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Enemies and Evidences 
of Christianity 

THOUGHTS ON QUESTIONS OF 
THE HOUR 



BY 

JOHN DUNCAN QUACKENBOS, A.M., M.D. 

Emeritus Professor in Columbia University 




New York: EATON & MAINS 

Cincinnati t JENNINGS Sc GRAHAM 






Copyright, 1899, 1909, by 
EATON & MAINS 



LIBRARY «W ..INGRESS 
Two O'""- rt»*cejved 

MAY 5 1809 

dlSS^iL. XXa No. 



TO MY MOTHER, 

NOW WITH CHRIST, 

WHOSE LOVING COMMENDATION WAS TO ME A HOLY STIMULUS 

IN THE PREPARATION OF THE FOLLOWING CHAPTERS, 

THIS VOLUME 

IS 

AFFECTIONATELY AND REVERENTLY 

DEDICATED. 



PREFACE TO REVISED EDITION 



TEN years have elapsed since this volume on 
Christian evidences and reasons for Chris- 
tian belief was given to the public. It is with 
the feeling that what was said at that time in its 
twelve chapters is doubly true to-day, and 
doubly necessary, that the author has prepared 
this new edition of the work. Ethical culture 
societies and New Thought cults are claiming to 
offer the world a better philosophy than that of 
Jesus Christ. The churches are denounced as 
mistaken and inadequate in their teachings. 
Congregations are dwindling to an alarming 
degree. The Sabbath is given up exclusively to 
pleasure. Old-time obligations are laughed to 
scorn, and systems that compromise with the 
conscience are heartily welcomed. Our women 
have become careless of the safeguards that 
should surround their sex. Children are defiant 
of parents, and parents forgetful of obligations 
to children. A growing disregard of the moral 
right of the man to life, property, character, and 
reputation is conspicuous. And sins that burned 
Sodom and caused the downfall of Greece and 



io PREFACE TO REVISED EDITION. 

Rome are rampant in our metropolitan and rural 
life. 

In that these pages suggest a remedy for 
existing conditions through a better acquaintance 
with the spirit and teachings of Christianity, 
they may be regarded as opportune. 

The chapter on Spiritism has been entirely 
rewritten in the light of the author's own inves- 
tigations, and the preposterous claims of so- 
called Spiritualists are offset by an exposition of 
the Psychologic Proof of Immortality. 

JOHN DUNCAN QUACKENBOS. 
New York, March 15, 1909. 



TABLE OF CONTENTS 



PAGE 
The Preeminent Claims of Christianity 15 

What is Christianity More than Hinduism, the Pantheistic 

Religion of India ? 38 

What is Christianity More than Buddhism, with its At- 
tractive Analogies to the Practical Teachings of Our 
Own Faith ? 64 

What is Christianity More than Confucianism, the Eth- 
ical System of China ? 93 

What is Christianity More than Muhammadanism, the 

Monotheistic Religion of the Koran ? 118 

What is Christianity More than Theosophy? 142 

What is Christianity More than Spiritism, which Seeks to 
Prove Survival of Death through Communication 
with Disembodied Spirits? With an Exposition on 
the True Psychologic Proof of Immortality 165 

What is Christianity More than Christian Science? 198 

What is Christianity More than Socialism, Communism, 

and Economic Democracy ? 232 

What is Christianity More than Altruism, or Socio-Com- 

mercial Love ? 263 

What is Christianity More than Agnosticism ? Modern 

Doubt and Christian Conviction.. 294 

Evidences of Christianity 333 



Enemies and Evidences 
of Christianity 



The Preeminent Gaims of Christianity* 

(What is thy beloved more than another beloved, O thou fairest 
among women ? Song of Solomon, v. 9.) 

In " The Crown of Wild Olive" it seems to 
me that John Ruskin has described with sin- 
gular discrimination the age upon which we 
have fallen. After speaking of exaltation into 
bright human life, he continues as follows : 

"Then comes the period when conscience 
and intellect are so highly developed that new 
forms of error begin in the inability to fulfill 
the demands of the one or to answer the 
doubts of the other. Then the wholeness of 
the people is lost. All kinds of hypocrisies 
and oppositions of science develop them- 
selves. Their faith is questioned on one side 
and compromised with on the other. Wealth 
commonly increases at the same period to a 
destructive extent ; luxury follows, and the 
ruin of the nation is certain." 

What a faithful picture of the day in which 
we live — a day whose grasp on truth is nerve- 
less ; a day of false liberalism ; of misconcep- 
tion, ignorance, and self-assurance ; of im- 
patience of old restraints and established 



16 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES 

boundaries; of sneer at principle; of gold-lust 
and leisure-love ; of profound indifference, the 
most fruitful factor in the production of evil. 
Since the world curtsied at the lift of Roman 
scepters, Christianity has not been so relent- 
lessly assailed by open and insidious foes. 

Antiquated Oriental systems are presented 
as its rivals by skeptics and haters of the faith 
who have purloined the noblest conceptions 
and even the very phraseology of the gospels 
to gild the base metal of Eastern philosophy. 
Infidelity is maintaining agencies in heathen 
lands for the collection of ammunition to be 
used against the truth. Parliaments of reli- 
gions give color to the heresy that salvation 
is not through Christ alone ; and native advo- 
cates of foreign faiths, while craftily conceal- 
ing the organic defects of their own beliefs, 
palm off on a credulous American public the 
monstrous falsehood that all religions teach 
in common these two great truths, the Father- 
hood of God and the Brotherhood of Man. 
Learned Brahmans and Buddhists are pa- 
raded on our platforms, where they bewitch 
the unwary with rechauffes of the arguments 
of English infidels in favor of their false gods, 
declaring that Christ and Buddha are one 
and that there is no hope beyond the final 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 17 

reincarnation. Their bibles and catechisms, 
agleam with Christian beauty, are circulated 
in attractive print and binding, and the 
heathen systems of the East are masquerad- 
ing in the costumes of Western heterodoxies 
with new and high-sounding titles. Every 
section of our country has advocates of Ori- 
ental occultism and pantheism in the adher- 
ents of Christian Science, Spiritism, and 
Theosophy. Our magazines and reviews 
print eulogiums of new standards of faith and 
morals. Cheap antichristian arguments 
help to insure a sale for the Sunday editions 
of our dailies, and not only corrupt millions 
of home readers but are eagerly devoured, in 
a swarm of reprints, by the ranchmen and 
miners of the frontier. 

Materialists are asserting that the brain 
secretes thought as the sweat glands secrete 
perspiration — that thought is material; and 
Monists are pronouncing religion a product 
of abstraction and reflection, and finding the 
origin of all religions in the common wants 
of mankind. Christ they place on a plane 
with Buddha, Confucius, and Plato ; but by 
tactfully admitting him to be the greatest of 
human teachers they have secured a hold on 

a Christian-bred class who are agnostically 
2 



18 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES 

inclined, and like the reed of Scripture are 
shaken by every wind of doctrine. 

But most dangerous is the teaching of that 
broad universalism which, assuming that the 
divine underlies all creeds, would make other 
religions as pure and sacred as our own, and 
include all faiths and isms in what Professor 
Ellinwood has styled " one sweet emulsion 
of meaningless negations, which patronizes 
Christ and applies the name of Christianity 
to doctrines the very opposite of its teachu 

ings." 

It has become fashionable among the ultra- 
cultured to regard Christianity as " a respect- 
able mythology," like the author of " Robert 
Elsmere ; " to deny the existence of a personal 
Deity, and define God as identical with matter 
and energy ; to scout the responsibility of 
man to a Being outside and above him, and 
to limit his responsibility to his own self, and 
to humanity from which it is declared he has 
received the best it had to give and to which 
he must return what he himself has pro- 
duced. 

Thinkers of the Guyau type, ignoring the 
fact that Jesus commanded us to love God 
with our intellects and that Christian civili- 
zation is associated with the highest state of 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 19 

mental efficiency, assert that the essence of 
the influence of Christianity is the develop- 
ment of the heart at the expense of the brain ; 
and after assuming the false premise, they 
denounce such a development as a sort of 
disturbance of equilibrium producing a nat- 
ural monstrosity, and predict a future with- 
out any religion. 

Men like Goldwin Smith are proclaiming 
that we but tamper with our understandings 
and consciences when we claim that the Old 
Testament contains both a divine and a hu- 
man element. " Far better," he says, " to 
admit that the sacred books of the Hebrews 
are the works of man and not of God." 

Others, of somewhat opposite view, hold 
that the Bible is inspired ; but, they add, so 
is the Bhagavad GitS. of the Hindus, and the 
Tripitaka of the Buddhists, and the Analects 
of Confucius, and the Koran, and Shakes- 
peare's plays, and Milton's " Paradise Lost." 
All are inspired ; but all are a mixture of 
truth and error, and so require continuous 
editing and correction to bring them up to 
date and make them harmonize with the 
times. And when the work is accomplished, 
we are then, Dr. Hastings has naively re- 
marked, " to believe and obey just as much 



20 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES 

and just as little of any or all of them as we 
please." 

" Advanced " clergymen, falling into line 
with other sensationists, are denouncing what 
they style ki the traditional systems of divin- 
ity," and unblushingly clamor for a u new and 
real religion of some sort," "a gospel in the 
vernacular of the twentieth century which 
shall repudiate the hackneyed doctrine of 
atonement" — vicars of Christ calling for a 
new religion in place of our Jehovah-con- 
ceived Christianity, old yet forever new — the 
same yesterday, to-day, and to-morrow — bear- 
ing awful semblance to the Deity who de- 
signed it for man, unchangefulness in the 
midst of change ! 

Intellectual culture divorced from religious 
training; is leading thousands to view Chris- 
tianity with distrust. Forgetful that they 
owe directly to the Christian religion every- 
thing that makes life endurable, every uplift 
of the present century, such persons are 
always ready to listen to attacks on our na- 
tional faith and to applaud the scurrilous 
blasphemy of infidel lecturers. Thus they 
are gradually laughed out of what little belief 
in Christianity may still cling to their shriv- 
eled souls. 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 21 

Masses of half-educated people are psychol- 
ogized by the glaring transparencies of 
science falsely so called, and enthusiastically 
espouse the cause of every innovation. Many 
do not know enough to believe the Bible. 
Others know so much that they are blinded 
by their knowledge, and hence really know 
nothing. Meditation has become a lost art. 
People hate to be made to think, and the 
alternative is skepticism or credulity. Every 
charlatan has a legion of followers. Euro- 
pean enemies of religion are attempting to 
force upon us their non-religion ; and with it 
their Sabbath desecration, its natural mother, 
and their anarchism, its legitimate child. 
Old world indifferentism is spreading among 
our people like a contagious disease. Prayer 
is denounced as hallucination or madness. 
So-called free thought renders the church 
superfluous ; as in the city of Paris, where 
one hundred and sixty-nine places of wor- 
ship suffice for nearly three millions of 
people. 

This is one side of the canvas. The other 
reveals a spectacle of studied appeal to the 
animal passions of men and women, lighting 
unquenchable fires in the hearts of the young 
and susceptible. Everywhere the sensual is 



22 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES 

emphasized ; in the theaters, clubs, restau- 
rants — even in the amusements, dress, and 
daily surroundings of professing Christians. 
Christ is dishonored on either hand. The 
very saloon has its psychology and art is 
prostituted to inflame desire for drink. The 
pageant sickens the soul : novels promulgat- 
ing low views of the marriage relation, which 
has degenerated from a spiritual union to a 
physical partnership — fashionable women de- 
claring it the height of immorality to become 
mothers — communists teaching concubinage 
to be less reprehensible than marriage — com- 
munists forbidding to marry — other commu- 
nists teaching and practicing the community 
of wives in common with material property — 
fanatics preaching a female Christ and a fe- 
male principle in the Godhead — women at 
the acme of spiritistic blasphemy affecting to 
contract marriage with demons ! Recent 
words of Gladstone recur to me : " The cita- 
del of Christianity is in these days besieged 
all round its circuit," and he whose soul does 
not flame with indignation at these efforts to 
corrupt and ruin his fellows is ignorant of the 
full meaning of love to man. 

It is my purpose in this series of addresses 
to contrast Christianity with those ancient 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 23 

beliefs that false teachers are proclaiming its 
equals ; to demonstrate its preeminent claims 
to acceptance by man, and to show that it 
can have no affiliation with the modern " isms " 
that seek to destroy it by compromise and 
accommodation. A host of religious faiths 
is challenging our investigation and forcing 
us into comparisons with our own. We need 
have no fear of such examination if we are 
prepared to note fundamental differences as 
well as accidental similitudes. Such study 
broadens our knowledge of Christianity itself. 
He who knows Shakespeare alone does not 
know Shakespeare, because he does not know 
him in his relation to contemporary drama- 
tists. So he who knows Christianity alone 
does not know it, because he does not know 
its points of superiority ; because he does 
not know that all the vaunted truth and 
beauty of oriental and classical pessimism is 
found in the " Memoirs of Christ," our four 
gospels, in completer form, in absolute per- 
fection. 

Moreover, Christianity courts rational in- 
vestigation, demands that we should deal 
with questions of faith with our understand- 
ings, deprecates presuming on ignorance in 
matters theological, abhors superstition. 



24 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES 

Christianity is the Religion of Reason ; it 
is founded on rational premises. It is not 
an instinct. It impels men to act in opposi- 
tion to their instincts and propensities. If 
it be superior to the Oriental religions it 
must be capable of adducing incontestable 
proof of its preeminence. The ultimate faith 
of the world will be the faith " that satisfies 
the reason of man with its explanation of the 
fundamental principles of the universe on 
the one hand, and on the other of the nature 
and destiny of the human race." 

Max Muller once said that the ancient re- 
ligions of the world were but the milk of 
Nature, which was in due time to be suc- 
ceeded by the Bread of Life. What is this 
Bread of Life more than the milk of Nature? 
I feel that it is incumbent upon us to ap- 
proach the subject with reverence for what 
is pure and bright and true in other systems ; 
in all kindliness and sincerity ; in thankful- 
ness to God for the seers of the past, the 
men with great ideals who looked for better 
things without fruition, who did the best 
they could with the light they had, and per- 
haps in the providence of God have figured 
as path-pavers for the religion of Christ. We 
shall lose nothing by admitting the heathen 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 25 

cults to have had a part to play in Gods 
educational system. But this is not an ad- 
mission that Christianity is a mere evolution 
from the religions that preceded it. These 
religions, as we know them, represent so 
many wrecks, so many falls from purity 
and truth ; for all in their germs were mono- 
theistic, all are based on faith in immortality. 
Manetho indicates that the earliest creed of 
Egypt was a belief in one God. Tablets 
found amid the ruins of Nineveh contain 
prayers to an Omnipotent One. " When we 
ascend," says Max Miiller, " to the most dis- 
tant heights of Greek history, the idea of 
God as a Supreme Being stands before us as 
a simple fact." The Vedic faith of India, 
the ancient belief of China, the Shinto of Ja- 
pan, testify to the existence of a God above 
all gods. And Naville truly remarks that 
11 Almost all pagans seem to have had a 
glimpse of the Divine Unity over the multi- 
plicity of their idols." The farther back we 
go, the purer the faith we encounter. Thus 
the Bible narrative is strangely confirmed. 
The very moral precepts of the Sacred Books 
of the East " condemn the nations who hold 
the truth in unrighteousness, and enforce the 
great doctrine that by their own consciences 



26 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES 

all mankind are convicted of sin." Were 
there such a thing as moral and spiritual evo- 
lution, we should long ago have been a race 
of gods, beyond the reach of temptation, no 
longer in need of grace. 

You will discover phenomenal moral ex- 
cellence in some of the systems of religion 
we are to study ; but you are to remember 
that the Gospel is more than a perfect system 
of ethics. The difference between religion 
and morality is thus summed up by Ruskin : 
11 Religion signifies the feelings of love, rev- 
erence, or dread with which the human mind 
is affected by its conceptions of spiritual be- 
ing, and you know well how necessary it is 
both to the rightness of our own life and to 
the understanding of the lives of others that 
we should always keep clearly distinguished 
our ideas of religion as thus defined and of 
morality as the law of rightness in human 
conduct. For there are many religions, but 
there is only one morality. There are mora! 
and immoral religions which differ as much 
in precept as in emotion. But there is only 
one morality, which has been, is, and must 
be forever, an instinct in the hearts of all 
civilized men, as certain and unalterable as 
their outward bodily form, and which receives 






OF CHRISTIANITY. 27 

from religion not law, but hope of felicity." 
The Christian religion is essentially a moral 
religion ; but it is vastly more, because it rec- 
ognizes in love for God and love for man 
the vital principle of the moral law. In the 
following respects it is preeminent over all 
other faiths : 

I. Christianity is the only religion that 
does for man what he cannot do for himself; 
that furnishes any help outside himself to 
aid him in his battle with the world and with 
his own evil heart. It represents a hand 
stretched down from heaven ; and the grop- 
ing, imploring human hands that are locked 
in the clasp of the Christ-hand are washed 
from the stains of doubt and the blackness 
of sin, and are led over obstacle and through 
temptation and sorrow to a peace which no 
system of philosophy or ethics has ever of- 
fered. Thousands have been snatched from 
the defaulter's shame, and the harlots de- 
spair, and the gamblers self-destroying hand, 
and the drunkards grave, by the saving grace 
of Jesus Christ. And thousands of sinners puri- 
fied and made strong by the faith of Jesus are 
asking the unbeliever with startling signifi- 
cance," What has your way of thinking done 
for you ? Has it made you better, or stronger, 



28 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES 

or happier? Has it enabled you to endure 
the disappointments and sorrows of existence 
with greater fortitude and resignation ? Has 
it helped you to disentangle the perplexities 
of your life ? Has it given you faith in an 
Infallible Principle of Love that permits and 
wills even all that you suffer ? " And his an- 
swer is in the negative. He admits the phi- 
losophy heralded as an improvement upon 
that of Jesus Christ to be a failure. Christi- 
anity beholds a personal Providence watch- 
ing and guarding us ; a God who answers 
prayer and shapes our lives and our eternal 
destinies, whose judgment is unerring, whose 
ordering is always for the best, whose long- 
suffering is inexhaustible. Our God is not 
nebular or remote, like the God of other 
systems; but he is present in our lives, where 
his guidance is so mysterious and tenderly 
discriminating that many times we hardly 
suspect its presence. In the fifth Logion of 
the Gospel according to the Egyptians, Jesus 
saith : " Wherever there is one believer, I 
am with him. Raise the stone and there 
thou shalt find me. Cleave the wood and 
there am I." Christ present in all things, 
always with us and in us ; the loving, helpful 
friend, enabling us to do what we are power- 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 29 

less to accomplish alone ; the brother who 
never misunderstands. How sweet it is to 
be understood. How we prize human sym- 
pathy and support ; but the sympathy and 
support of Heaven as realized by the Chris- 
tian are far sweeter. Remember that Jesus 
alone has taught us to call God by the en- 
dearing name of " father ; " thus, as Drum- 
mond says, " importing into religion the 
grandest word of human language." 

II. Christianity is the only religion that 
wipes guilt away, that offers any hope or 
consolation to the sinner, that lifts the burden 
of his remorse. Of other religions the con- 
science-stricken offender is ever asking : 

" Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased, 
Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow, 
Raze out the written troubles of the brain, 
And with some sweet oblivious antidote 
Cleanse the stuff'd bosom of that perilous stuff 
Which weighs upon the heart ? " 

The child of sorrow is forever asking this 
of other faiths, and they are speechless. They 
are not dispensers of consolation, healers ot 
the broken heart. But when I turn to this 
New Testament, I find its every page glis- 
tening with the bright promises of forgive- 
ness and spiritual refreshment. I am bidden 
to come freely unto the meek and lowly in 



3 o ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES 

heart for the rest my soul longs for. " In 
the exhaustless catalogue of Heaven's mer- 
cies to mankind," wrote Dickens, M the power 
of finding some germs of comfort in the 
hardest trials must ever occupy the fore- 
most place." 

Xone but Jesus has ever ventured to say: 
M Come unto me, all ye who labor," who are 
oppressed with sins, who are sickened with 
cares and disappointments and fears for the 
future, and I will lighten your load, and break 
the galling yoke of pride, and selfishness, 
and worldly indulgence • for I am accessible 
to the most obscure, the most depraved. 
u And you shall have rest unto your souls;" 
not inaction, for there is no true rest in a 
life of indolence — in the paradise of the slug- 
gard, in the cocoon of the Buddhist, in the 
heaven of the coward, where there are no 
ideals to be realized, no victories to be won. 
This is not the rest Christ promises ; but 
rest in harmony with the laws of beauty and 
love and poetry, a conscious joyous existence 
in eternity where I am known of mine, for- 
given of God, and pledged to a gladsome 
service. Show me such hope, such comfort, 
outside of Christianity. 

III. Christianity is the only religion that 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 



3i 



transforms character and makes it beautiful ; 
that transfuses God into a career ; thus plant- 
ing a divine germ, a vital principle, which 
slowly and spontaneously expands in the 
sunshine of a magnetic love. You are struck 
by the sweetness, the symmetry, the inde- 
scribable charm of such a character. You 
watch its daily growth in a culture that is 
not of the earth ; and you are forced to ad- 
mit the fact that no other religion can de- 
velop so true a quality of holiness, such a com- 
bination of the good and the beautiful. Far 
be it from us to deny that Buddha and Con- 
fucius prescribe admirable rules of conduct. 
The ethics of Cicero and Seneca, of Aurelius 
and Boethius, command our respect. But all 
are practical failures because, while they 
erect high moral standards, they confer no 
power on man to live thereafter. And the 
reason is that mere morality is mechanical. 
It is the dead diamond, lustrous but soulless. 
It flashes in its neutral setting, but kindles 
no fires of aspiration. The difference be- 
tween a moral man and a Christian man lies 
not in the character of their deeds, but in 
the motives that incite those deeds, in the 
spirit of the life. One rivets his eyes to the 
Star of Bethlehem, and treads onward and 



32 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES 

upward with an energy nursed by its ray; 
the other gazes out into an empty heaven 
with the stare of a figure in marble or wax. 

IV. Finally, Christianity is the only reli- 
gion which, regarding death as " the climax 
of communion between the soul and God," 
assures an immortality with high aim and 
elevated desire. For this intensely positive 
future, the Christian lives. His religion 
teaches him the deathlessness of the soul ; 
that what is called death is only a gradua- 
tion from one school of life for matriculation 
in another on the part of an indestructible 
unit that can never die; and that the growth 
of this immortal unit beyond the grave will 
be in the line of its deliberate choice here. 
Selfish, sensual, annihilation heavens have 
been imagined by man. But the heaven of 
Christianity is one in which the souls of the 
departed possess consciousness and memory, 
sympathy, sensibility to pleasure and pain, and 
to experiences of happiness and misery. It is 
a heaven where those who have gone before 
keep us ever in remembrance ; where there 
will be recognition of friends and exchanges 
of histories when lips meet lips again. The 
Bible nowhere excludes the thought of recog- 
nition ; nowhere hints that the love stronger 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 33 

than death, the personal affections that are 
the mightiest agencies in the formation of 
character here, are to be swept out of exist- 
ence as the murmur of eternity breaks upon 
the ear, plunging the soul into an isolation 
that either knows no love or finds no scope 
for its activity. The heaven of Christianity 
is a heaven of conscious life, of fellowship 
with God and the redeemed, of growth and 
progress of soul ; not of swoon, or absorp- 
tion in a Something-Nothing God, but of 
activity, of advance in knowledge, of develop- 
ment of capacities latent at death, of slum- 
bering genius unrecognized on earth, till 
the soul arrives at the perfection of refine- 
ment, power, and happiness. 

There is no hope like this in any of the 
great religions of the Orient. One by one, 
as we take them up for consideration, we 
shall find them wanting in these four con- 
spicuous characteristics of Christianity. 

Such is the faith we Christians profess. Is 
it not our duty to make it superlatively at- 
tractive ; so full of the comfort and sympathy 
men are longing for that our Christ and his 
Gospel will seem to them as the shadow of 
a great rock in a weary land, as a gushing 
spring to the fainting traveler, as the bright 



34 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES 

beam of outer day spied by the poor prisoner 
through his dungeon grate? And may we 
not commit the error of exaggerating the re- 
quirements for admission to the fold, remem- 
bering that no soul is too low to be reached 
by the sympathy of Jesus. We are the 
almoners of the riches of God's grace. Let 
us make friends, then, of the outcast, the 
misguided, the souls that hesitate between 
doubt and conviction in these days of mental 
unrest when the scale-pans of faith and 
no-faith tremble ominously in even balance. 
For every soul, I care not how black it seem, 
is like the Cavern of Luray — perhaps dark 
to the casual glance through some crevice, 
but when the torch is lifted and its recesses 
are flooded with the light of the Gospel it 
will flash, like the cave, with supernatural 
beauty. 

Christianity makes love the mainspring of 
its ethics, and love impels to action. The 
sounds of a great battle are distinctly audible; 
and it ill becomes Christian men who have 
the requisite ability and knowledge to stand 
aloof from the battle-ground of rational con- 
troversy. I say battle-ground, and battle- 
ground of fearless disputation, in contrast to 
the slumber-chamber of willful indifference 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 35 

and the quadrangle of imbecile denunciation 
from afar. We are face to face with error in 
many monstrous shapes, and this error can- 
not be overcome by blinding our eyes to it, 
or by discordant notes of warning, or by the 
occasional remonstrances of a handicapped 
pulpit. The times demand an active partici- 
pation in the warfare by men and women 
who have rubbed the sleepy- seeds from their 
eyes and are fully awake to the startling 
necessities and perils of the hour. 

I cannot but believe that in the provi- 
dence of God the day has come when the 
great forces of this world are about to com- 
bine for the spread of enlightenment and 
truth. I look upon the Spanish-American 
War as having been permitted by Provi- 
dence in order to arouse the old American 
spirit and convert this nation into a mighty 
imperial people physically able and intellec- 
tually adapted to shape and sway the desti- 
nies of the earth ; to carry our flag, with our 
civilization, institutions and religion, to the 
uttermost heathen, to the people sitting in 
darkness, and make them glad unto temporal 
happiness and eternal salvation. God be 
praised that England has joined hands with 
us in this great and holy mission. Race- 



36 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES 

patriotism is the talk of the hour. We are 
of the same stock — possessed of the same un- 
faltering adherence to principle, the same 
deathless love of country. England's mis- 
sion hitherto has been to carry her civiliza- 
tion outward into the wide world of squalor 
and heathenism ; ours, to receive into this 
fair land the heterogeneous masses from 
other countries and unify and educate them 
here, making them useful and intelligent 
members of this great commonwealth. So 
transcendently successful has been the double 
policy (differently directed yet single in its 
issue) that to-day one hundred and fifty mil- 
lions of human beings, in Great Britain and 
her colonial possessions in Africa, Asia, and 
Oceania, in the United States and in the Do- 
minion of Canada, write or converse in the 
English language. And one quarter of the 
landed surface of the earth is under the do- 
minion of English and American people, who 
rule one third of the population of the globe. 
England and the United States together can 
say to the nations, " Do this," and it will be 
done. The United States and England to- 
gether can put an end to wrong belief and 
wrong action in every corner of the world; 
can terminate once and forever Turkish 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 37 

atrocities and the Muhammadan slave trade ;* 
can break the chains of every oppressed race 
by a single mandate ; can flash light into the 
dark strongholds of heathenism and sav- 
agery, and bring the Hindu and the Buddhist, 
the Confucian, the Taoist and the Shintoist 
of Japan to the feet of the Saviour, and thus 
to a perfect acceptance of the principle of 
love as the law and inspiration of human ex- 
istence. When the Orient apprehends this 
principle, the Orient is ours. 



What is Christianity More than Hinduism, the 
Pantheistic Religion of India? 

(By their fruits ye shall know them. Matthew vii. 16.) 

A religion not professed and practiced 
within reach of investigation enjoys this 
decided advantage over those that are ac- 
cessible to personal criticism, viz., its radical 
defects are hardly perceptible, while the im- 
agination, particularly if the religion be eulo- 
gized by native professors and enthusiastic 
oriental scholars, encircles it with an aureola 
of graces. Remoteness in time and place, 
tending to the obscuration of imperfections 
and the looming of merits, assuredly imparts 
the traditional enchantment to our view. No 
faith has been more the subject of such intel- 
lectual mirage than Hinduism. But when 
you hear it discussed by its own swamis 
your potential admiration must shortly be 
transformed into actual disgust. It will not 
stand the definition given to it by your men- 
tal lorgnette. You are struck by its vague- 
ness. You can not fathom the meaning of 
those who attempt to analyze its potpourri 
of dogmas, for hardly two are in accord. 
You will not accept its final uncompromising 



EVIDENCES OF CHRISTIANITY. 39 

creed that nothing really exists but the one 
universal spirit, or impersonal self, Brahm, 
and that whatever appears to exist separately 
is a mere illusion ; that this Brahm manifests 
himself variously in sensible things ; and that 
all living beings are but emanations from him, 
and ultimately are absorbed into his essence 
— human beings through 8,400,000 reincarna- 
tions and 30,000 cycles of woe. 

In order intelligently to comprehend the 
religions of India, we must make ourselves 
acquainted with two early Hindu works 
which stand in very much the same relation 
to Hinduism as does our Bible to Christian- 
ity. These works are the Veda (the oldest 
book in Indo-European literature, dating 
from 2000 B. C.) and the Bhagavad Gita, or 
Divine Song. The Veda, or Science, is a 
collection of historical hymns, chants, prayers, 
and sacrificial rites ; as well as of incantations 
and spells in the efficacy of which, to ward 
off disease, inspire love, endow with riches, 
and bring misfortunes to ones enemies, the 
ancient Hindus were unquestioning believers. 
Among the Vedic writings are the Brah- 
manas, which contain ancient rituals and 
priestly dicta on matters of religious worship ; 
and the Upanishads, treatises of a theosophic 



40 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES 

nature reflecting the earliest attempts of the 
Hindu mind to explore the mysteries of ex- 
istence. " In the Vedic Hymns," says Pro- 
fessor Hopkins, "man fears the gods and 
imagines God. In the Brahmanas, man sub- 
dues the gods, and fears God. In the Upa- 
nishads, man ignores the gods, and becomes 
God." 

A number of the Vedic hymns suggest a pri- 
mordial belief in One Supreme Being; while 
others clearly evidence a descent from mono- 
theism to polytheism. In the 1,017 metrical 
hymns of the Rig-Veda (Veda of Songs, — by 
several hundred authors, and comprising 
10,580 verses), "thrice eleven " divinities are 
addressed, the principal of whom are the 
sun, the moon, the day, fire, the storm (In- 
dra), the god of waters, the dawn-goddess 
(Ushas), and the earth. These gods were 
immortal ; clothed with power to answer 
prayer, and punish those who offended them. 
Certain hymns appear to embody a concep- 
tion of one omnipotent, self-existent Deity, 
" God above all gods," " that One alone who 
has upheld the spheres." " Wise poets," says 
the Rig-Veda, " make the Beautiful-winged, 
though he is one, manifold by words." " He 
is the only master of the world ; he fills 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 41 

heaven and earth. He gives life and strength ; 
all the other gods seek for his blessing ; 
death and immortality are but his shadow." 
Thus the mytho-poetic religion of the Veda 
would seem to stand out in mezzo-rilievo 
from a monotheistic background. The Brah- 
mans regard it in the light of a revelation 
from the Creator to men ; and their teachers 
declare that there can not be a Saviour unless 
he be a revealer of the truth eternally en- 
wrapped in the Veda. 

The parts of the Veda especially studied 
and quoted as authority to-day by educated 
Hindus are the Upanishads, or Confidential 
Communications, dating from 700 B.C. The 
religion of these treatises is pantheistic. 
They deal with the deepest mysteries and 
most perplexing problems of human life and 
human destiny; with the genesis of the uni- 
verse and of the soul of man ; and in them, 
it has been said, " religion awakes with 
fuller spiritual life than is found in any other 
pre-Christian system." 

The teachings of these Upanishads are the 
tap-root of six great Hindu systems of phi- 
losophy, the chief of which is the Vedanta 
(end of the Veda), with its pantheistic belief 
in one ingenerable, immutable, incorruptible 



42 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES 

Reality ; its autochthonal doctrine that this 
Spiritual Absolute exists truly, everything 
else falsely, and that the only truth is the 
unity of all souls in this one Impersonal Soul ; 
its theosophic principle that a tenuous astral 
wrapper clings to the soul at death, the ves- 
ture of transmigrating spirits as they pass 
from body to body and from sphere to sphere 
through countless series of incarnations ; and 
its extravagant claim that Brahm, as the op- 
erative cause of the existence, continuance, 
and dissolution of the world, is the real 
author of all our acts, and we are not respon- 
sible. You may remember that this was the 
defense of the assassin of President Garfield, 
" I am God's man ; God compelled me to fire 
the fatal shot." " The soul is not an actor," 
are Krishna's words ; it is only the man de- 
luded by egoism that imagines himself pos- 
sessed of free will. We wander in God like 
helpless somnambulists. Personal sin is 
therefore impossible. 

The Katha, the best known Upanishad, 
teaches transmigration. " At death, some are 
reborn as organic bodies, others go into in- 
organic matter, according to their work and 
knowledge." This doctrine satisfactorily ex- 
plained the sufferings of seemingly innocent 



OF CHRfSTIANITY. 43 

persons, finding the cause of these in crimes 
committed in a preexistent state. In the 
pathetic Episode of King Nala, Damayanti 
the Lotus-eyed, when abandoned by her hus- 
band in the wilderness, thus gives utterance 
to her grief: 

" No good fortune e'er attends me ; of what guilt is this the 

doom ? 
Not a sin can I remember ; not the least to living man, 
Or in deed, or thought, or language. Of what guilt is this the 

doom ? 
In some former life committed expiate I now the sin ; 
To this infinite misfortune, hence by penal justice doomed. 
Lost my husband, lost my kingdom, from my kindred separate ; 
Separate from noble Nala, from my children far away, 
Widowed of my rightful guardian in the serpent-haunted 

wood." 

A work which reflects the philosophy of 
the Upanishads, and is believed to be the 
joint production of a number of authors and 
editors in the first or second century A. D., is 
the Bhagavad Gita, or the Divine Song, called 
also the Lords Lay and the Song of the 
Adorable, by far the most important work 
for the study of those who desire to under- 
stand the religious belief of the higher classes 
in India. This Bhagavad Gita is an anthol- 
ogy of the best things in Hinduism. Its 
philosophy is eclectic, and it seems to repre- 
sent an attempt to harmonize the several 



44 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES 

conflicting native systems by rejecting the 
conglomerate but retaining the gems ; to pre- 
sent the nonpareils of Hindu wisdom, the es- 
sence of all the sacred writings. Mohini 
Mohun Chatterji, the translator of a recent 
edition of this philosophical poem published 
in Boston " for the benefit of those in search 
of spiritual light," calls attention to two hun- 
dred and fourteen passages that are paral- 
leled in the Bible ; not with a view of 
proving that there was borrowing on either 
side, but rather to establish his position that 
both New Testament and Gita are revela- 
tions from the Hindu god Vishnu, equally 
worthy of acceptance. The effrontery im- 
plied in presenting such an issue to the 
American public is artfully seconded by a 
dangerous commentary, completing the 
equipment of the poem for its mission as a 
deceiver of cultured thousands who are igno- 
rant of Hindu philosophy and hence do not 
perceive that most of the parallels are fanci- 
ful, are mere coincidences, like many in Seneca 
and Aurelius, or are transcriptions from early 
Hindu versions of the Scriptures; who do 
not appreciate the motive of the translator, 
or recognize the intermixture of Christian 
conceptions and the plunder of Christian 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 45 

terminology ; who fail to detect the absurdi- 
ties, foolish repetitions, and conspicuous con- 
tradictions ; and who are dazzled by the 
occasional sublimity of the delineations. The 
theosophy of this work antedates the Chris- 
tian era ; but there is unmistakable evidence 
of interpolations, of modifications of an orig- 
inal text, evincing an effort to import into 
the poem much that pertains to the history 
and nature of Christianity — to make the re- 
ligion of India, in other words, as Christian 
as possible. 

The Bhagavad Gita opens by withdraw- 
ing the reader for a while from the tumult of 
a great national war and introducing him to 
a profound theological dialogue between the 
god Krishna (Vishnu) and his favorite 
knight, Arjuna, which dialogue constitutes 
the poem. On the eve of a decisive battle, 
with Arjuna hesitating to precipitate the con- 
flict which may bring him a crown but at the 
cost of many lives, the deity seeks to remove 
the scruples of the knight in the following 
sublime argument, in some respects among 
the most exalted utterances of man : — 

11 Ne'er was the time when I was not, nor thou, nor yonder 

kings of earth : 
Hereafter, ne'er shall be the time when one of us shall cease 

to be. 



46 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES 

The soul, within its mortal frame, glides on thro' childhood, 

youth, and age ; 
Then in another form renewed, renews its stated course 

again. 
All indestructible is He that spread the living universe ; 
And who is he that shall destroy the work of the Inde- 
structible ? 
Corruptible these bodies are that wrap the everlasting soul-— 
The eternal, unimaginable soul. Whence on to battle, 

Bharata ! 
For he that thinks to slay the soul, or he that thinks the soul 

is slain, 
Are fondly both alike deceived : it is not slain — it slayeth not ; 
It is not born — it doth not die ; past, present, future knows 

it not ; 
Ancient, eternal, and unchanged, it dies not with the dying 

frame. 
Who knows it incorruptible, and everlasting, and unborn, 
What heeds he whether he may slay, or fall himself in battle 

slain ? 
As their old garments men cast off, anon new raiment to 

assume, 
So casts the soul its worn-out frame, and takes at once 

another form. 
The weapon cannot pierce it through, nor wastes it the con- 
i suming fire ; 

The liquid waters melt it not, nor dries it up the parching 

wind ; 
Impenetrable and unburned ; impermeable and undried ; 
Perpetual, ever-wandering, firm, indissoluble, permanent, 
Invisible, unspeakable."* 

Such an elevated treatment as this of 
the souls immortality, which, en passant, is 
transplanted bodily from the KathS, Upani- 

* Milman's translation. 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 47 

shad, is nicely calculated to deceive the 
unwary Western reader, so ready in his en- 
comiums as to the lofty thoughts and moral 
grandeur of the Gita. But, if the same be 
analyzed, it will be seen unmistakably to re- 
flect the doctrines of transmigration, ante- 
mundane life, and personal pantheism. 

The pith and marrow of Hinduism is con- 
tained in this poem. All real existence of 
the individual soul is denied, and the eternal 
identity of a given soul with every other 
human soul and with the Soul of God is 
flatly proclaimed. The apparent existence 
of many souls or selfs, explains the trans- 
lator, is due to the operation of a power 
called Falsehood because it is not the Spirit 
of God, which is the only Reality. The Git& 
further teaches that the Supreme Being is 
one and secondless, and the true self or in- 
nermost spirit in us is no other than this 
Supreme Being. Therefore every person 
who abstracts his mind from all considera- 
tions of the false self, his apparent soul, can 
justly say, " I am God. God is, and he and 
I are one ! " " The wise man is Myself," says 
the god Krishna. " This is my opinion, be- 
cause the wise man is established on the 
road to the superior goal, which is Myself.*' 



48 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES 

Think of a God Supreme having only an 
opinion, and actually presenting it as a de- 
batable question. Such is the pantheism of 
the Gita, evident in many other passages, to 
wit : " The Supreme Spirit is the act of 
offering. The Supreme Spirit is sacrificial 
butter, offered by the sacrificer who is the 
Supreme Spirit, into the fire which is the 
Supreme Spirit/' " The universe is produced 
out of the Divine Substance which never 
changes. It is not a thing, but it is the power 
of the Deity." Chatterji feebly explains that 
it is identical with the Deity, but at the 
same time the Deity is not the universe. 
They are, however, identical. 

The God we worship is not an abstrac- 
tion ; but the self-conscious, self-consistent* 
personal Author and Finisher of nature in- 
finite, absolute, perfect — in whom the human 
reason discerns a comprehensible beginning, 
an all-sufficient cause, and a sovereign guid- 
ance to a premeditated and clearly foreseen 
termination. And the universe, to quote the 
words of Dr. William M. Bryant* " the 
universe in Space, hanging on nothing, as 
Job described it, can be but the perpetually 
complete utterance of this Perfect Mind as 

* In " Life, Death, and Immortality." 






OF CHRISTIANITY. 49 

the absolutely spontaneous, self-moved, all 
inclusive One, beyond which there is no 
Reality whatever." 

Christianity teaches the presence of God 
in nature and the universe, but not the iden- 
tity of God with nature and the universe, or 
of nature and the universe with God. This 
latter philosophy it has ever deprecated. 
Immanence and identity are separable ideas. 
An able Catholic writer* recently said : 
" Like pantheism, Christianity admits God in 
the world and the world in God. Unlike 
pantheism, however, it does not make us 
frail mortals of God's own substance, nor 
God of ours, but leaves him superior to us by 
the whole length and breadth of his infinity. 
Yet does he surround us all, men and things 
alike ; support us all, empower us all to act ; 
and without his aid would we one and all, 
earth and heaven, cease to be, as darkness 
follows when the sun withdraws its light. 
Thus the very desideratum which pantheism 
is supposed to furnish, namely, a God in the 
world and a world in God, is found in Chris- 
tianity more nobly and more rationally ex- 
pressed." 

Further, the God of Christianity is not 

* Edmund T. Shanahmi. 



5o ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES 

only universal, but he is also concrete ; con- 
crete in the incarnation Christ Jesus; not an 
impersonal Christ, but a specific person on 
whom the heart's affections may be fixed. As 
President Hyde of Bowdoin College re- 
marks : " A Father who has begotten no Son, 
and sent forth no Spirit into the world, is to 
all intents and purposes no God at all. The 
abstract universal and nonentity are equiva- 
lents/' No wonder the Hindu calls his god 
both Something and Nothing, both Supreme 
and Not-Supreme. 

The human mind naturally thinks in par- 
ticulars and, therefore, demands concrete ex- 
pression. The soul of man cannot long 
remain loyal to a God who is nothing more 
to it than a nebular philosophical abstraction. 
The universal must become resolved into the 
particular. The intangible Divine must be- 
come incarnate in the tangible human. The 
impalpable spiritual must apparel itself in 
flesh and blood in order to impress men and 
women with its reality — in order to kindle 
their love, enlist their service, inspire the 
sacrifice of their fortunes and very lives. 
And this is what we have in Christianity ; a 
human brother, a concrete Mediator be- 
tween us and the infinite Jehovah. To this 






OF CHRISTIANITY. 51 

concrete Saviour the human intellect can rivet 
itself. This personal Jesus, human affections 
can center themselves upon, and human reason 
can apprehend, and human hope embrace, 
and human faith forever trust. The keynote 
of our faith is sounded by St. John in the 
thirty-first verse of the twentieth chapter of 
his Gospel : " That ye may believe that Jesus 
is the Christ, the Son of God ; and that be- 
lieving ye may have life in his name." There 
is no Oriental uncertainty about this. The 
purpose of the Gospel is clearly set forth, 
to save men through faith in a crucified 
Christ. Had I no other evidence of super- 
natural wisdom in Christianity than the fact 
that the God of Christianity sent into this 
world, for the salvation of sinners and the 
consolation of the stricken, a personal, con- 
crete, accessible Saviour, Christ Jesus, that 
fact alone would be convincing ! 

And as for man, Christianity does not 
make him one with God, the same in substance 
with the perfect personal Wisdom and the 
perfect personal Love. But it regards every 
human being as a thought of God committed 
to this earth for its embodiment, develop- 
ment, and execution ; not as God incarnate, 
for Christianity knows but a single incarna- 



52 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES 

tion, even Jesus Christ, the only begotten 
Son of God ; begotten of his Father before 
all worlds, God of God, Light of Light, 
very God of very God, begotten, not made, 
being of one substance with the Father by 
whom all things were made. 

What a contrast between the loose panthe- 
ism of the Bhagavad Git&, which declares 
that those who worship whatever God they 
choose are sure to gain the heaven they long 
for ; and which together with the personality 
of God blots out man's responsibility for sin — 
and the clear idea of the fatherhood of God, 
and the brotherhood of Christ, and the im- 
mortality of the individual and responsible 
soul, as projected in the New Testament. 

Nor is this God of the Gita a god of love 
like the God of Christianity. He is depicted 
as the one Creator, Regulator, and Destroyer 
of the universe and all it contains. As the 
universe is declared to be God, this god, in 
his role as the destroyer of the universe, 
figures as a suicide — and this is moon-struck 
madness. He is defined as having no rela- 
tion to anything, and declares, " There is 
none either hated or loved by me," He does 
not hate the vicious or love the virtuous ; 
and yet the Second Hexad closes with this 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 53 

striking contradiction on the part of the truly 
inscrutable God of the Gita : " Those who 
worship this immortality-bearing law, regard- 
ing Me as the supreme end, are excessively 
beloved by me." 

There can be no love in a religion that 
enforces the distinctions of caste and exhorts 
to a life of quietism or passive meditation. 
" He whose joy is within," says the god of 
the Bhagavad Gita, "whose diversion is 
within, whose light is within, is the man of 
right knowledge. Becoming the Supreme 
God, he attains to efifacement in the Supreme 
God." To our amazement we are subse- 
quently informed that renunciation or cessa- 
tion of action is the same thing as action, be- 
cause it implies an act ; and that the acme of 
renunciation is that state in which the inten- 
tion to renounce is also renounced. The 
chapter ends with the following admission on 
the part of the astonishing Blessed Lord of 
the Bhagavad Gita, the infinitely attributed 
Attributeless, the neither Aught nor Naught, 
the Something-Nothing God, the Supreme 
Paradox — who states with characteristic hu- 
man reserve, " The man of meditation, in my 
opinion, is superior to the man of penance 
and to men of action. This is my opinion." 



54 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES 

Of course there are other opinions differing 
from that of Almighty God ; and again we 
are forced on to debatable ground. 

The God of the Gita describes himself as a 
passive on-looker ; as Pure Indifference ; and 
the great aim of Brahman philosophy is to 
teach men to abstain from actions both good 
and bad. Actions it regards as the shackles 
of the soul. When the soul rids itself of ac- 
tion by continuous contemplation it will re- 
turn to the condition of separated spirit, its 
proper impersonal nature ; to " the fontal 
unity of undifferenced spiritual existence," 
and become insphered in Brahm. So the 
promise given by this deity, of heavenly en- 
joyments in a future state as the result of 
meritorious works which he has just discour- 
aged, if not forbidden, must, to the devotee 
who in a previous chapter is told to expect 
effacement, involve two preposterous contra- 
dictions. There is no such thing as rational 
immortality in the Indie system. 

In contrast to this ascetic inertness is the 
Christian life of active energy, the faith ac- 
companied with works, the loving to live that 
we may live to love. The Christian does not 
flee from the world, but remains at work in 
it. Flight would unfit him for citizenship in 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 



SS 



the Kingdom of the Hereafter. The spirit 
of his religion is one of utmost warm-hearted- 
ness, conditioned by a recognition of equality 
in rights and conditioning in turn the exist- 
ence of true democracy. Chatterji publishes 
his desire to banish all " unbrotherliness " 
from the earth ; and yet this Song of the 
Adorable that he has so artfully edited em- 
phasizes the duties of caste before all other 
obligations. Its spirit is thus distinctively 
antagonistic to forces now at work to achieve 
the unification of mankind. 

Such are the main teachings of a book that 
is most popular in India and most widely cir- 
culated in translations through Western 
lands; which figures as the text of Hindu 
swamis now among us because, they declare, 
America is starving for spiritual refreshment, 
and because, in spite of the ignorance of its 
upper classes and the savagery of the rank 
and file, there are many souls thirsting for 
higher things; a thirst which Hinduism is 
going to assuage. Hinduism ! I have shown 
you the best of it ; but when you scan the 
pages of its other religious books you will 
hardly fail to approve Max Mullers numer- 
ous omissions from his translations of the 
Sacred Texts of the East. " Had many pas- 



56 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES 

sages not been suppressed/' he explains, " I 
should have been prosecuted for publishing 
obscene literature." And these are the reli- 
gious oracles, these are the Bibles that are 
lauded to the skies by Hindu swamis, amid 
the approving smiles of hare-brained Ameri- 
can maids and mothers — women supremely 
ignorant of the true nature and trend of Hin- 
duism and equally so, I say it to their shame ! 
of the essential doctrines of pure Christian- 
ity ; women who are utter strangers to the 
original Indo-Iranian texts, and wholly uncon- 
scious of the amazing preeminence of the 
Bible from a literary as well as a moral stand- 
point ; women easily captivated by supple- 
chapped Hindu graduates from English col- 
leges, and always on the qui vive to indorse 
every slur upon the religion of their fathers 
and the moral perfection of Jesus. 

Pantheism or the identity of the universe 
with God, reincarnation, ascetic inaction — 
the upper classes of India hold these tenets 
of the Gita, while the millions are steeped in 
fetishism, and worship a multitude of gods. 
You may well ask, What have three thousand 
years of pantheism, ascetic practices, caste 
distinction, rhythmic breathing to free the 
soul from the sufferings of transmigration, 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 57 

silent concentration to shorten the time of 
reaching a perfection which is effacement, re- 
volting methods of self-torture as means of 
growing in holiness — what have three thou- 
sand years of all this done for India? " By 
their fruits ye shall know them." 

You have your answer in the social wretch- 
edness beneath which India is prostrate; the 
poverty, the squalor, the neglect of sanitary 
requirements, and in the legitimate outcome 
of it all, the cholera, the leprosy, the bubo 
plague, the famine, as every-day experiences ; 
in the heart-rending ignorance of the super- 
stition-ridden millions, the worshipers of back- 
yard stocks and niche-set images and grisly 
shapes asquat in the mandirs and idol-houses ; 
in the prevalent fetishism, or adoration of the 
spirits believed to be incorporated in amulets 
of tigers' teeth and serpents' fangs and 
quaintly-fashioned shells. You have your 
answer in the perverted conceptions of mo- 
rality that approve a god of robbers, whose 
Thugs choke their victims to death as an act 
of religion ; that accept deities who are repre- 
sented as licentious drunkards throughout 
the national literature. You have your an- 
swer in the frightful immorality of certain 
sects whose amorous gods delight in adultery 



58 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES 

and incest ; whose rites are characterized by 
the most shocking sensuality ; whose priestly 
lechers have woven the details of Christian 
story into the flesh-colored legends of Krishna 
and have stolen from Christianity the notion 
of a Trinity in order to harmonize the oppos- 
ing claims of Brahmanism, Krishnaism, and 
Sivaism ; and whose Woman Trinity, com- 
posed of the female principles of Brahma, 
Vishnu, and Siva, with its worship full of 
sadism and bestial abominations, would seem 
to out-Ashtoreth the goddess of the Zido- 
nians. 

You have your answer in such absurdities 
as the beast-hospitals of western India, where 
all kinds of invalided animals, including epi- 
zoa, which superstition forbids to be killed 
and so put out of misery, are supported and 
treated, and where loving care that is due to 
humanity alone is lavished on brutes ; where 
cities in which God is denied, man worshiped, 
and vermin revered, are subjected to special 
taxation for the maintenance of sacred rats ; 
and where holy monkeys affected with the 
bubo plague are left at liberty to infect hu- 
man beings with deadly microphytes, the san- 
itary authorities being powerless to interfere 
in the face of a fanatical opposition. 



OF CHRISTIANITY. S9 

You have your answer in the miracle- 
mongering and trickery, and in the daily 
spectacles of filthy faineants standing in dis- 
tressful attitudes, with arms upstretched till 
muscles stiffen, with eyes fixed upon the sun 
till the sense of sight is burned out, with 
finger-nails clinched in doubled-up hands so 
that the life of inaction, the object of per- 
verted desire, becomes imperative. 

Finally, you have your answer in the fash- 
ion of child marriage, which is the climax 
curse of India. Matrimony is enjoined as a 
religious obligation at the age of five or six. 
Babes are born to children of twelve. Ner- 
vous systems are bankrupt at twenty; and 
society is largely composed of emasculated 
degenerates. Widowhood (and there are 
child widows as young as nine years of age) 
is regarded as a punishment for crimes com- 
mitted in a preexistent state ; hence these 
child-widows are treated as reprobate ; as 
under the ban of Gods displeasure. Cursed 
by her husbands relatives as the contriver 
of his death and cast into a prison cell with 
a life sentence, the lot of an Indian girl- 
widow is one of helpless, hopeless misery. 
— Creeds are indeed to be rated by their 
products. 



60 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES 

Hinduism is a failure because, by teaching 
ultimate effacement through innumerable 
transmigrations of the soul, it virtually pro- 
claims the doctrine that birth into the world 
is the greatest of misfortunes. 

Because it perpetuates under the authority 
of religion, the social tyranny of caste, where- 
by certain privileges or certain disabilities 
are transmitted from parents to children ; 
w r hereby the laboring classes are cut off from 
the kindly interest and ministrations of the 
better elements of society, and thus insur- 
mountable barriers are erected to separate 
man from his brother. 

Because it degrades woman from the po- 
sition she occupied in primitive Aryan com- 
munities, where, although the practice of 
bride-purchase prevailed, polygamy was rare. 
Christianity sufficiently establishes its di- 
vinity by the moral and social uplift it has 
always meant for the sex that its Founder 
forever glorified through the motherhood of 
Mary the Virgin. The gods of Hindustan 
care only for men. 

Because it seeks to obliterate the God-es- 
tablished differences between man and brute. 
The brute does nothing but live. He has 
made no advances during the six thousand 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 61 

years he has been under observation, his in- 
stincts being mature at birth. He has no 
aspirations, no ambitions ; he does not live 
for the future ; he is without responsibility- 
Man differs from the mere animal in that he 
lives for something, consciously and respon- 
sibly lives. But Indian Yogis and Mahat- 
mas are only human vegetables that reek and 
rot in the fetid atmosphere of the falsest re- 
ligion devised by intelligent man. The pur- 
suivants of Christ are distinguished by the 
cognizance of Progress — a widespread, eager, 
and enlightened progress ; a progress in in- 
telligence, knowledge, and charity, without 
sacrifice of Christian sentiment or Christian 
principle. Hinduism is all maudlin visions 
relating to a foggy future; Christianity con- 
cerns itself with the exigencies of an intensely 
real present. The one has been character- 
ized as all spirit and life ; the other, as all 
letter and death. Christianity has evolved 
from barbaric germs the mighty nations that 
control the world's affairs. Hinduism has 
dragged from the heights of social and reli- 
gious purity a race once foremost in litera- 
ture, art, and military power, to sink it in the 
depths of a frightful obscenity tinseled with 
religious names and flaunted in the temples 



62 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES 

of the gods. The intellectual and moral 
status of the Christian world to-day is the 
strongest evidence that can be demanded 
or adduced of the truth of the religion which 
has wrought it. 

How, then, is it possible to be sincerely 
enamored of such a faith as Hinduism? On 
what ground is such vaporing as that of 
Mrs. Besant warrantable ? " We have for 
years sent hosts of missionaries, with millions 
of money, to convert the Hindus, with little 
success. Now they send over a few men at 
slight expense, and have converted every- 
body." The last allegation is false ; but it is 
unfortunately true that misguided Christian 
teachers went into India with a cross in one 
hand and a scourge in the other ; and that 
the unprincipled representatives of Christian 
nations have for four centuries interpreted 
to the natives, from a purely selfish point of 
view, Christ's command to love one's neigh- 
bor as one's self. The tongue spoke of 
charity, the arm drove a poniard to the heart. 
The fault has not been with the poor heathen, 
but with the false Christianity that has been 
exhibited to them. 

When we are confronted with the super- 
stitions, the shocking sensuality, the awful 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 63 

degradation that are the legitimate products 
of Hinduism, our hearts cry out in a great 
longing to set things right. Is it not enough 
to melt the whole Christian church into a 
unity, an alliance of spiritual forces against 
these powers of darkness ? Has it not, at 
this dawn hour of the twentieth century, be- 
come the duty of Christians to fuse all 
points of disagreement in one great hearts 
love for the Saviour, and carry the message 
of his sacrifice and resurrection as a single 
consistent army of the Cross to the nations 
from whom God still is hidden by the umbra 
of an eclipsing theosophy ; who, looking 
heavenward for the face of a life-giving Sun, 
meet only the total shadow of an intercept- 
ing hopelessness, projected through a vast 
full of too distant stars? 



What is Christianity More Than Buddhism, With 
Its Attractive Analogies to the Practical Teach- 
ings of Our Own Faith? 

(They have no helper. Job xxx. 13. I do nothing of myself. John 

viii. 28.) 

Dean Stanley somewhere said : " The great 
aim which God has placed before the human 
intellect is the quest of truth — truth for its 
own sake. And, 1 ' he adds, " the most excel- 
lent service universities or teachers can ren- 
der to the human reason in this arduous en- 
terprise is not to restrain or to blindfold it, 
but to clear aside every obstacle, to open wide 
the path, to chase away the phantoms." It is 
in the spirit of this wholesome counsel that I 
approach the subject of Buddhism, with the 
purpose of laying bare to your view the heart 
of its gospel. What is there in the so-called 
"wisdom-religion" that has bewitched intel- 
lectual thousands in Europe and America? 
What charm about it to give origin to the im- 
pression that it can " lift us into larger power 
and gladness ? " What the secret of effect 
in the seductive pictures that are limned of its 
beauty in the boudoirs of the superlatively 



EVIDENCES OF CHRISTIANITY. 65 

refined ? Will this " divine science, which 
the chosen noble few have known since man 
first recognized himself as a god," be found to 
retain its seemingly attractive features when 
illuminated by the search-lights of truth? 

Let us first glance at its place in history. 
Buddhism represents an intellectual revolt 
against the religion of the Brahmans, against 
sacerdotalism, caste, and ecclesiastical corrup- 
tions ; and this revolt a reader of the Upani- 
shads is constrained to anticipate. He is 
sensible of a lull before the cyclone, and he 
is not surprised to detect a storm-center soon 
after at Kapilavastu, the capital of the Sakyas, 
whose prince Siddhartha became the Buddha, 
the foremost reformer of the non-Christian 
world. 

As Buddhism sprung from the Vedic and 
Brahman systems, it has much in common 
with them. But, unlike Hinduism, it is athe- 
istic. Hinduism is chiefly concerned with 
God ; Buddhism with man. The founder of 
the latter system brought himself to believe 
that a loving Father was unnecessary. So 
far as worship is involved, there is no God to 
the disciple of Buddha. The late Bishop of 
Calcutta recounts that he once asked a 

Buddhist, whom he found at prayers in a 
5 



66 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES 

native temple, what he was praying for. The 
answer was, " Nothing." "To whom are you 
offering prayers ? " he continued. "I am pray- 
ing to nobody," was the characteristic re- 
sponse. A Buddhist cannot pray as do we, 
for he cannot conceive of a personal Provi- 
dence ; therefore he has nothing to pray to. 
His apparent prayer is meditation on the re- 
puted perfections of Buddha and on the hope of 
final effacement in a state called Nirvana, 
implying the extinction of personal identity. 
Nirvana is defined by modern Buddhists as 
11 a condition of total cessation of changes ; 
of perfect rest ; of the absence of desire, and 
illusion, and sorrow; of the total obliteration 
of everything that goes to make up the phys- 
ical man. Before reaching Nirvana, man is 
constantly being re-born ; when he reaches 
Nirvana, he is re-born no more." 

In Nirvana, according to another author- 
ity, there is " complete fading out and cessa- 
tion of desire. Therefore is Nirvana called 
a letting go, a loosing hold, a relinquishment 
and non-adhesion. For Nirvana is one; but 
its names,based on its oppositions, are many — 
to wit, complete fading out, complete cessa- 
tion^ letting go, a loosing hold, a relinquish- 
ment, a non-adhesion ; the perishing of passion, 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 67 

the perishing of infatuation, the perishing of 
desire, non-origination, deliverance from con- 
ception, deliverance from re-birth." 

Buddhism, moreover, makes every man his 
own Saviour, or attainer of annihilation in this 
Eternal Nothing, this Essenceless Quiet. It 
is thus out of harmony with the central tenet 
of Christian teaching, that man can be saved 
only through the merits and sacrifice of God's 
own Son. All are doomed to suffer in their 
own persons, and not vicariously, either in the 
present life or in future states of existence. 
The penalty of sin is re-birth. Human units 
may assume an indefinite number of forms. 
Hewho is to-daya man may, in previous states, 
have led the life of a horse, dog, bird, fish, 
snake, worm. The doctrine of re-births is 
founded on the theory that " perfect justice, 
equilibrium, and adjustment are inherent in 
the universal law of Nature ; and that one life 
is not long enough for the reward or punish- 
ment of a man's deeds. The great circle of 
re-births will be more or less quickly run ac- 
cording to the preponderating purity or im- 
purity of the several lives of the individual."* 
Like Hinduism, Buddhism teaches renuncia- 
tion of action and self-mortification as means 



* Olcott's tl A Buddhist Catechism.*' 



68 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES 

of putting an end to re-births and hastening 
the final doom of effacement. 

A multitude of worthless legends obscures 
the life-history of Buddha, and makes it dif- 
ficult to construct an authentic biography. 
The story of his career assumed its present 
form about 600 A. D. He appears to have 
been a warrior-prince of the Sakyas of Oude, 
who at the age of twenty-nine (about 530 
B. C.) renounced his kingdom, and went out 
into the world, actuated (unlike the Prophet 
of Nazareth) by a purely selfish motive, 
viz., the desire to save his own soul. The 
improvement of the human race did not enter 
into his calculations. 

The legend runs as follows : One night, 
when all were asleep, Siddhartha arose, took 
a last look at his wife and infant son, mounted 
his favorite white horse, and rode to the pal- 
ace gate. The Devas had thrown a deep 
sleep upon his fathers guards, so they heard 
not the clatter of the horses hoofs. The gate 
opened noiselessly of its own accord, and 
Siddhartha rode away into the darkness. In 
the jungle he surrendered himself to Yoga 
discipline, with the hope of discovering the 
reason for human sorrow and of freeing him- 
self from sickness, death, and rebirth. But 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 69 

self-mortification made him no wiser. He 
finally reached the conclusion that knowledge 
could not be attained by mere fasting or self- 
inflicted torture, suddenly gave up the ascetic 
life, and seated himself under a Bo or Bodhi- 
tree (tree of knowledge) at Buddha-Gaya, to 
meditate. He had resolved to become Buddha, 
or Enlightened, for his own good alone. But 
while he sat beneath the Bo-tree, the story 
goes that the god Brahma came down and 
persuaded him to become a universal Buddha 
and save the human race. Buddhists point 
to this experience under the Bo-tree as the 
Great Awakening in which their prophet was 
inspired to preach a new gospel. The Light 
of Supreme Knowledge, the Light of the 
Four Truths, was suddenly flashed into his 
soul, and he became Buddha, the Illuminated 
One, the All-Wise. 

The Four Noble Truths thus revealed to 
Buddha, and as he taught them, are : — 

I. Birth is sorrow ; growth is sorrow; sick- 
ness, death, age, is sorrow ; clinging to earthly 
things, separation from what we love, craving 
for what cannot be obtained — thus poetically 
put by Sir Edwin Arnold : — 

" First of the ' noble truths ' — how sorrow is 
Shadow to life, moving where life doth move, 



70 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES 

Not to be laid aside until one lays 
Living aside, with all its changing states, 
Birth, growth, decay, love, hatred, pleasure, pain, 
Being and doing ; how that none strips off 
These sad delights and pleasant griefs who lacks 
Knowledge to know them snares." 

II. Birth and rebirth (the chain of reincar- 
nation) result from the thirst for life, together 
with passion and desire. 

III. The only escape from this thirst for 
life and its pleasures is the annihilation of 
desire. 

IV. The only way of escape is by follow- 
ing the Eight-fold Path, the Good Law of 
Buddha, which leads to Nirvana, viz. : 

i. Right Views (freedom from delusion). 

2. Right Aims (worthy of an intelligent 
man). 

3. Right Speech (kindly, open, truthful). 

4. Right Conduct (honest, peaceful, pure). 

5. Right Livelihood (hurting no living 
thing). ^ 

6. Right Effort (in self-training and self- 
control). 

7. Right Mindfulness (an active, watchful 
mind). 

8. Right Contemplation (earnest thought 
on the mysteries of life). 

These are the famous four great truths 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 



7i 



and the eight-fold path so eulogized by 
American Buddhists — borrowed by the way 
from a Brahman source, for Buddha was 
anything but original. There is nothing re- 
markable about them. All they stand for, 
and infinitely more, is taught, and better 
taught, in the New Testament. 

The sacred books of the Buddhists are 
called the Tripitaka, or Three Baskets. One 
is metaphysical, another disciplinary, and the 
third contains discourses for the laity with 
the aphorisms of Buddha. They are written 
in a dialect of Sanscrit, and are made up of 
600,000 stanzas, representing, exclusive of 
repetitions, twice as much matter as our 
Bible. The altruism of the Tripitaka is illus- 
trated in such precepts as the following : — 

" Like a beautiful flower, full of color but without scent, are 
the fine but fruitless words of him who does not act accord- 
ingly. 

" As the bee collects nectar, and departs without injuring 
the flower, or its color and scent, so let the sage dwell on earth. 

"Let no man think lightly of evil, saying in his heart, 'It 
will not come near unto me/ Even by the falling of water- 
drops a water-pot is filled ; the fool becomes full of evil, even 
if he gathers it little by little. 

"The succoring of mother and father, the cherishing of 
child and wife, and the following of a lawful thing— this is the 
greatest blessing. 

"The giving of alms, the abstaining from sins, the eschew- 
ing of intoxicating drink, diligence in good deeds, reverence 



72 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES 

and humility, contentment and gratitude — this is the greatest 
blessing. 

" Let us live happily, then, though we call nothing our own ; 
not hating those who hate us, free from greed among the 
greedy. We shall then be like the bright gods, feeding on 
happiness." 

This is the attar of Buddhistic philan- 
thropy ; the few distilled drops from thou- 
sands of precepts. 

The Four Great Truths and Rules of 
Practical Conduct were first promulgated at 
Benares. Absence of all such malevolent op- 
position as Christianity militant encountered 
in storming the intrenched vice of the Ro- 
man Empire, the fascination of the neighbor- 
morality teachings, and the personal magnet- 
ism of Buddha himself, — explain his success. 
But the religion he founded, despite its eth- 
ical elements, and its humanitarian trend in 
deprecating war, in enjoining kindliness to 
man, and in substituting real for mere cere- 
monial righteousness, has never developed 
sufficient energy to supplant the older reli- 
gion of any country in which it has secured 
a foothold. During a struggle of many cen- 
turies it disputed with Brahmanism for the 
supremacy of India. Pushed out at last to 
the northeast, it made its way into Thibet, 
China, and Japan, where it has demonstrated 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 73 

its powerlessness to overthrow the revolting 
nature-worship of the Mongolian races. It 
exists side by side with Confucianism, Taoism, 
and Shintoism, and is accepted with them by 
those who profess these faiths. At the pres- 
ent day, the followers of this religion, who 
once outnumbered those of any other, have 
dwindled to about 100,000,000. 

What, then, can be the secret of its suc- 
cessful appeal to people of higher culture ? 
What explains the position of a Buddhist 
priest who declared at the Parliament of Re- 
ligions in Chicago : " There is no better 
place in the world to propagate the teach- 
ings of Buddhism than America, where 
Christianity is merely an adornment of soci- 
ety and is deeply believed in by very few?" 
Is it that the Oriental upholders of Buddhism, 
recognizing its rapid loss of vitality and 
the relaxing of its grasp on the vast popula- 
tions once loyal to its sway ; foreseeing that 
it is destined to be swept from the earth by 
a combination of intellectual forces against 
which they are powerless to contend — are, in 
the hope of deferring the sky-set of their faith, 
turning to Europe and America and offering to 
Western Aryans, as Buddhism, a bastard sys- 
tem of altruism sugared with sweet extracts 



74 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES 

from the Gospels, wholly unlike the faith that 
Buddha taught with " its corner-stone of athe- 
ism and its cap-stone of annihilation ?" 

A work that has done much to encourage 
the deception, by reason of its burlesque pres- 
entation of Buddhism in an up-to-date style 
of dress, is Sir Edwin Arnold's " Light of 
Asia/' a poem full of noble sentiments, but 
which does not tell the true story of this faith, 
and is worthless as an historical or critical 
piece of literature. The beauty of the poem 
is the glimmer borrowed from Christian 
pearls ; its ugliness, the gloom of native 
slime-pits. It purports to be a tale in verse 
of the life and teachings of Gautama Buddha, 
"the Saviour of the World," by an Indian 
Buddhist — who, however, plagiarized whole- 
sale from the New Testament and the life 
of Christ to fleck with abnormal lights and 
colors a dead and hideous canvas. The 
black original is not wholly painted over ; 
blotches of background stand out conspicu- 
ous amid the ingeniously applied re-touches. 
What of sublimity can a cultivated mind see 
in its doctrine of reincarnation ? 

" Life runs its round of living, climbing up 
From mote, and gnat, and worm, reptile and fish, 
Bird and shagged beast, man, demon, deva, God, 
To clod and mote again." 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 75 

Most degrading is the thought that a human 
soul has ever tenanted the body of a beast. 
Most repulsive, from the standpoint of intel- 
ligence and refinement, is Lord Buddhas ex- 
planation of how and why his heart took 
sudden fire at the first glance of the radiant 
Sakya girl, Yasodhara, whom he made his 
Queen : — 

" We were not strangers. 

While the wheel of birth and death turns round 

Past things and thoughts and buried lives come back. 

I now remember, myriad rains ago, 

What time I roamed Himala's hanging woods 

A tiger, with my striped and hungry kind ; 

I, who am Buddh [that is the avatar of a supreme god], 

couched in the kusa grass 
Gazing with green blinked eyes upon the herds 
Which pastured near and nearer to their death. 



Amid the beasts that were my fellows there, 

Met in deep jungle or by reedy jheel, 

A tigress, comeliest of the forest, set 

The males at war. Her hide was lit with gold 

Black-broidered like the veil Yasodhara 

Wore for me. Hot the strife waxed in that wood 

With tooth and claw, while underneath a neem 

The fair beast watched us bleed, thus fiercely wooed. 

And I remember at the end she came 

Snarling past this and that torn forest lord 

Which I had conquered, and with fawning jaws 

Licked my quick heaving flank and with me went 

Into the wild with proud steps amorously. 

The wheel of birth and death turns low and hi<rh. M 



76 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES 

And this is Mr. Arnolds Saviour of the 
World, the Teacher of Nirvana and the Law, 
that it is the fashion to go into raptures over 
— a confessed beast-lover who sings mere ca- 
pricious brute selection instead of that lofty 
Christian virtue, that all-absorbing passion 
for one immortal soul which excludes all 
others from its silent depths, which knows no 
intermission and no change of flow, and which 
for those who recognize the spiritual side of 
marriage continues through eternity. Chris- 
tianity takes the high ground that those who 
enter into the marriage relation from other 
motives than such sublimed love infract God's 
seventh command ; and in taking this ground, 
it makes of love between the sexes a rational 
and spiritual susceptibility, in striking contrast 
to the animal passion of the Buddhist, passed 
from birds to beasts, and from beasts to men 
and women, through eons of transmigration. 

And another view, no less repulsive to intel- 
lectuality, is that of the Buddh throwing him- 
self under the paw of a hungry tigress to make 
a meal for her cubs, as an act of merit-bearing 
renunciation. How distinctive the teaching of 
Christianity here ! For a good man one would 
hardly dare to give his life ; and where stands 
he who throws it away on brutes and vermin ? 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 77 

Buddha's mission, according to this modern 
exposition of the faith, was " to seek deliver- 
ance and that unknown Light." Christ's is 
to offer deliverance and shine as the Light 
of the World. Buddha is a seeker after the 
truth. Christ is the Truth. " And where 
my quest will end," says the all-uncertain 
Buddha, " I know not." Christ knew his end, 
and ever proclaimed it to be the cross ! Bud- 
dha laid out an endless road to Heaven,by way 
of Hell. Christ opened a direct highway to 
his Kingdom through a service which he es- 
pecially declared not to be grievous. If you 
will read the " Light of Asia," thoughtfully 
through, and afterward one of the Gospels, 
I feel confident that you will arise from your 
study impressed, as was I, with this convic- 
tion : Buddha says and does everything as a 
man ; Christ, as Almighty God. 

The essential note of the theology, if it 
may be called a theology, is true to the spirit 
of Buddhism : There is no hope for man only 
in man. There is no Father, as proclaimed 
by Jesus, who in his human nature did noth- 
ing of himself. Every man is his own Saviour 
Your modern Buddhist neither acknowledges 
nor expects anything from divine power. A 
personal God he regards as a gigantic shadow 



78 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES 

thrown upon the void of space by the imag- 
ination of ignorant men. Says the editor of 
Olcott's " A Buddhist Catechism :" " O ye of 
little faith, crouching beneath a gigantic 
shadow thrown upon the void of space, know 
that there are as many gods — no more, no 
fewer, as there are human beings who have 
ever conceived an idea of Deity." 

So the tables are reversed and man has be- 
come the creator of the gods. Later Asiatic 
Buddhists, longing for a concrete object of 
worship, made Buddha a god. American 
Buddhists regard him as a saviour having 
equal claims with Christ, — " An all-seeing, all- 
wise counselor ; one who discovered the safe 
path and pointed it out; one who showed the 
cause of, and the only cure for, human suffer- 
ing. In pointing to the road, in showing us 
how to escape dangers, he became our guide. 
And as one leading a blind man across a nar- 
row bridge over a swift and deep stream saves 
his life, so in showing us, who were blind 
from ignorance, the way to salvation, Buddha 
may well be called our saviour." These are 
the words of an American gentleman, ex- 
tracted from a so-called Buddhist catechism 
that is circulated by the thousand copies 
among a mass of persons as ignorant of what 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 79 

Buddhism and Christianity really are as they 
are eager to dethrone the Son of God. 

The Buddhism which is influencing West- 
ern thought is largely counterfeit, consisting 
in the main of an altruistic philosophy notice- 
ably inferior to that of Christ's, though lib- 
erally borrowed from it. No intelligent 
Westerner who understands Buddhistic prin- 
ciples could for a moment consistently em- 
brace them. He would have to begin by re- 
nouncing the world with its responsibilities 
and pleasures, by severing all ties of family 
and friendship, and by adopting a life of med- 
itation and absolute inaction. For the thor- 
ough-paced Buddhist believes that actions, 
good or bad, are the direct cause of those 
repetitions of life he so much dreads ; of the 
ghastly immortality of transmigrations and 
measureless woe. His object is thus to cut 
short the rotation of the kaleidoscope and 
find an opiate for desire, the source of human 
misery, in the suppression of action and the 
obliteration of personality. Life is not worth 
the living to a sincere follower of Buddha, 
the greatest of pessimists. 

Inaction must certainly antagonize all that 
is altruistic in Buddhism. An exuberant love 
will not brook confinement behind the selfish 



So ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES 

pales of contemplation and mystic ecstasy. 
These are perversions, spiritual abortions. 
Genuine love must act, and act with judg- 
ment. And to love one's neighbor means 
more than to serve him, to make his interests 
our own. It is to love in others, even the 
mean-spirited, the uncharitable, the evildoers, 
that which is eternal ; that which is best and 
purest in man and hence is reflected from 
God. The consistent Christian lives as if he 
always so loved. But a faith which contem- 
plates ultimate soul-swoon has in it no place 
for such an affection. 

Jesus Christ assures us of what has been 
called " an immortality of ever intensifying 
consciousness, involving not merely rest and 
freedom from pain but also infinite activity 
(free and self-consistent as well) bringing the 
richest, deepest, most positive enjoyment." * 
In the heaven of Jesus, we retain our identity 
as fellow citizens with the saints and of the 
household of God. In the future state of 
Christianity, where the separated soul, beau- 
tified by death, becomes immediately con- 
scious, there will be growth in strength, prog- 
ress in intellectual discernment and power ; 
in susceptibility to Beauty, which is God, and 

♦Dr. Bryant's " Life, Death, and Immortality." 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 81 

* 

growth in beauty itself — the beauty of the 
divine image. In the heaven of Jesus, we 
come to our own again, our own who for 
reasons we cannot penetrate and dare not 
question have been removed from our sight 
and laid beneath the myrtle. It is the Here- 
after where we know what he does now ; 
where the cause of his action is clearly dis- 
cerned and is satisfying to the soul ; where 
we learn that our disappointments are the 
appointments of a God who inflicts suffering 
because he loves ; where we apprehend that 
the idolized son, the affectionate daughter, 
the father who is the support of the family, 
are taken because they are ripe for heaven, 
ready to be graduated from an inadequate 
training school here with an admittatur to the 
University of Eternity, better adapted to 
their needs and capacities ; because, per- 
haps, they have service to perform for their 
Master there and can no longer be spared ; 
because — who knows ? — they are too frail to 
withstand the storms that are gathering about 
them on earth ; to save them, it may be, from 
temptations they could not have resisted, 
from mental or bodily anguish that would 
have crushed the soul. Our finite minds may 
not fathom the purposes of the Infinite, nor 



82 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES 

safely attempt to limit the Limitless. If it be 
true that in that future life the soul progresses, 
refines, perfects — bereaved mother, you have 
everything to look forward to in your reunion 
with the child who was taken before his in- 
tellect was matured, before the life so full of 
promise had time to blossom ; every improve- 
ment to expect in the character that here was 
so prone to err, so impatient, so rebellious, 
yet withal so impressible and loving. In the 
heaven of Jesus, we come to our own again ; 
our own purified, and elevated, and God- 
taught ; made up into jewels of separate 
beauty by the divine Lapidary ; not grains of 
gold fused in an unwrought ingot, their indi- 
viduality forever lost. Which of these states 
of salvation appeals with greater force to the 
emotions and the reason of man ? 

Modern creed-mongers and apostles of 
ethical culture, who fain would contribute 
their puny modicum to the accumulated mass 
of force antagonistic to Christianity, are fond 
of asserting that our faith is but a reflection 
of the more ancient Buddhism which they 
style the Christianity of the East ; that Jesus 
unscrupulously plagiarized from the Tripit- 
aka ; that the biography of Christ as con- 
tained in the Gospels is merely a clever copy 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 83 

of the history of Buddha and of the libidinous 
Hindu god Krishna. And infidel writers of 
England and the Continent are in the habit 
of coupling Buddhism and Christianity as 
sister religions, the daughters of a common 
mother. 

The theory that Christianity is a distorted 
photograph of Buddhism has been honey- 
combed by modern scholarship. It is incon- 
ceivable that such plagiarism, did it exist, 
should have been undetected by highly edu- 
cated, sharp-witted Pharisees who were on 
the look-out for damning evidence ; by Cel- 
sus, the ancient exponent of the plagiarism 
theory ; by Porphyry, who proved, to his 
own satisfaction at least, that Pythagoras 
was the prototype of Christ. The borrow- 
ing was all the other way. Christianity is 
the worst of solvents ; Buddhism is as ab- 
sorbent as a sponge. Intent only on prov- 
ing that Jesus was the Messiah of the Old 
Testament, and always planting the Cross 
of Golgotha in the foreground of their the- 
ology, the early Christian fathers repelled 
the aggressive attacks of Gnosticism (the 
doctrine that knowledge, not faith, is the 
way to Heaven) ; of Neo-Platonism (which 
proclaimed the emission of all things from a 



84 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES 

supra-essential One, the emanation of matter 
from the soul, and the way of return to God 
through virtuous deeds and philosophic con- 
templation) ; and of Manichaeism (a mixture 
of Gnosticism, Persian Zoroastrianism, and 
Buddhism — with its old story of duality, and 
its ascetic teachings with their anomalous 
outcome of profligacy of life). Christianity 
is as intolerant as truth itself, the most in- 
tolerant of conceivable realities. Christi- 
anity knows no accommodation, no compro- 
mise. It disclaims all kinship with other 
faiths. Wherever accepted, it forces aside 
its predecessor, and establishes the exclusive 
worship of one sole Deity, who it declares is 
a Personal Spirit. And as it extends, it edu- 
cates, because its genius can be understood 
only by intelligent people. Buddhism, on 
the contrary, has shown itself always ready to 
amalgamate with other faiths, no matter how 
corrupt. By its contact with Christianity, its 
original atheism became modified into the- 
ism ; and as early as the seventh century 
A. D. it had adopted a trinity, an adroit 
counterfeit of the Tripersonal God. 

It is by reason of this assimilative ten- 
dency that Buddhism lacks definition, that 
no meaning can be extracted from its jungle 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 85 

of contradictions — which fact leads the fool 
of the nineteenth century to conclude that 
therefore they must be full of significance. 
The confused pictures made by its lenses 
have for centuries delighted the muddled 
Asiatic mind. They are equally pleasing to 
his. There is so much aberration (much of 
it chromatic) that one never knows when he 
is within and when without the focus of ex- 
act belief. Ones creed takes shape from 
ones desires. Hence the secret of the blood- 
less conquest of easy-going Asia. Hence a 
special cause of the popularity of Buddhism 
in Europe and America — the wide latitude it 
permits in the line of belief and practice. 
In contrast to its vagueness, the great 
truths of Christianity have such clearly 
chiseled outlines that they must be accepted 
for what they are, and not for anything the 
worldly convert may wish them to be. 

The assertion that Christianity and Bud- 
dhism are sister faiths because they appear 
to have a common ethical basis, is a monstrous 
presumption on American credulity or igno- 
rance. The points of dissimilarity so far out- 
number the casual features of resemblance as 
to preclude the possibility of a common 
parentage. One religion is the antipode of 



86 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES 

the other. There are no true parallels. Let 
me conclude by asking your attention to the 
following irreconcilable differences between 
the religion of Buddha and that of Jesus. 

Buddhism teaches the doctrine of Karma 
(the Doing), that a man is eternally bound 
by the consequences of his own deeds. His 
record must be faced ; his score must be 
settled somehow. What we call the soul is 
indeed blotted out. " With us, soul is com- 
monly said of the spiritual, and conse- 
quently imperishable and changeless, prin- 
ciple of the human constitution ; z. e., spirit, 
in the proper sense. With the Buddhist, 
soul is that semi-material and changeful 
part of man which enters into his present 
constitution, and may survive the disso- 
lution of the physical frame, but is not 
thereby become immortal. It is Plato's 
psyche or Paul's spiritual body ; the ghost 
of exoteric religions ; the perispirit of French 
psychists ; the astral form or biogen body of 
spiritism and theosophy. The soul sooner 
or later perishes like the physical body."* It 
is Karma that survives ; the aggregate of 
merits and demerits that controls the des- 
tiny of the sentient being, — 

* Olcott's " A Buddhist Catechism." 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 87 

" The Karma — all that total of a soul 
Which is the things it did, the thoughts it had, 
The ' self ' it wove, with woof of viewless time, 
Crossed on the warp invisible of acts." 

In this doctrine of Karma is involved the 
mystery (inexplicable even to the Buddhist) 
of the transfer of responsibility for sin from 
one transmigrating person to another. An 
infant comes into the world oppressed with 
the intolerable burden of some other human 
beings sinfulness. Acts determine the char- 
acter of descendants. " Our acts, therefore, 
live in their effects or subsequent forms. Un- 
til we can remove all material desires from our 
acts, they will always necessitate material ef- 
fects and produce reincarnations. . . . Atten- 
tion is to be drawn to the fact that this law 
offers a satisfactory explanation of the appar- 
ent injustices of life. We find around us not 
only pain and suffering, but also moral excel- 
lence and depravity, forced upon individuals 
by circumstances over which they seem to 
have no control." * 

Buddhism knows no forgiveness of sins; 
its only hope lies in a higher birth. Chris- 
tianity promises perfect deliverance from 
the spiritual results of transgression, free 
pardon for all sins save one — the ascrib- 

* Olcott's 4i A Buddhist Catechism." 



88 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES 

ing of the miracles of Christ to Satanic 
agency (aspersion of the Holy Ghost). 

Buddhism is an incongruous miscellany of 
humanitarian and agnostic elements, which 
has notoriously failed to improve moral con- 
ditions because there is no spiritual energy 
behind its ethical utterances. And herein 
lies the gist of contrast between this religion 
and Christianity, rather than in the letter of 
their respective precepts. Christianity un- 
reservedly pronounces that the energy which 
prompts its adherents to action, which lights 
an ethereal fire in the soul, is the power of 
the Holy Spirit. Buddhism, on the contrary, 
exhorts : " Be righteous by your own power. 
Be your own Inspirer, your own Comforter, 
your own Christ. Expect no help from a 
supernatural source." 

Buddhism bids men get rid of all notion of 
self, ego, personal identity, and manufacture a 
mass of personal merit with a view to a 
better birth hereafter and ultimate self-aboli- 
tion in Para-Nirvana. Christianity bids men 
get rid of selfishness, and so make them- 
selves reasonably fit for life in heaven 
in the presence of eternal beauty and 
goodness and truth. The Christian is ask- 
ing, What shall I do to gain this future? 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 89 

The Buddhist, What shall I do to blot it 
out? 

Christianity, regarding withdrawal to a re- 
cluse life as a crime against society, urges 
men to labor. Buddhism constrains them to 
abstain from action, and pass their lives in 
apathy and melancholia. Christianity puts 
its soldiers into the field and arrays them 
against spiritual foes. Buddhism locks its 
votaries in a castle on some dreamy Morro, 
and cautions them to, evade the battle. 

Christianity teaches that love perdures ; 
Buddhism, that it is to be extinguished by 
absorption in a loveless and unlovely Brahm, 
of whom Browning wrote that " a loving 
worm within its clod were diviner." 

Buddhism belittles the sacredness of home 
life, and laughs to scorn the exalted joys of 
the married state. It favors monkhood, and 
enjoins entrance into a monastic commu- 
nism. Buddha was a hater of woman, a self- 
ish deserter of wife and child ; and to-day, 
any Buddhist who desires to make trial of a 
new mistress has only to enter a retreat and 
remain celibate for a month. He thus secures 
a legal separation from all female companions, 
and the right to marry any woman he may 
select. For Buddhist women, eighteen hells 



9 o ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES 

are especially prepared ; but if they live vir- 
tuously through fifteen hundred reincarna- 
tions, they may be born once more as infant 
boys, and thus have a chance to attain 
Nirvana. 

Christ was a friend of woman. He re- 
garded and treated her as the equal of man, 
and was thus the first to proclaim her eman- 
cipation. None other has ever been so con- 
siderate of the sensitive nature of woman as 
Jesus Christ ; none other has shown such a 
knowledge and appreciation of the depth of 
her affection. None other ever spoke so 
reassuringly to faltering woman. None 
other ever so richly rewarded the faith of con- 
fiding woman. None other has ever been so 
forgiving to fallen woman. None ever built 
such safeguards about the chastity of woman, 
or spoke in such scorching denunciation of 
assault upon her purity. None other has 
made marriage so holy and indissoluble a 
union. None other used it to typify the 
divine relation to the Church, the Bride of 
God. None but Jesus ever spoke to woman, 
even to his earthly mother, as the Almighty 
from his throne. What wonder that woman 
was the last to wet his cross with her tears, 
the first to peer into the vacant sepulcher ! 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 91 

Finally, Buddhism is the child of supersti- 
tion, and thrives only where the light of 
science cannot penetrate. It knows no 
growth, no progress. It is nepenthes to the 
spirit of advancement. It is stagnation in- 
carnate. Its Para-Nirvana appropriates, and 
in appropriating palsies, the thinking ener- 
gies of its devotees, who have no conception 
whatever of a spiritual side to life. It has 
produced no brilliant types of manhood, 
evolved no heroes, upbuilt no states. Chris- 
tianity strikes an essentially different and in- 
comparably higher note in its recognition of 
the spiritual nature of man and thus of the 
true oneness of the human and the divine 
nature, man in Gods image. Those who 
profess Christianity afford the strongest evi- 
dence that its innermost spirit is the spirit of 
aspiration and achievement. Argue as you 
may in support of the basal teachings of 
other religions, Christianity alone has meant 
for man a loftier realization of truth and a 
nobler conception of duty. Christianity 
alone has carried the soul to the summits of 
its being. 

Christianity is the religion of reason ; and 
as such it embodies the spirit of inductive 
philosophical method, regarding appreciable 



92 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES 

facts as the utterances of eternal science and 
interpreting science, the universal law of 
God, through the facts as he discovers them. 
In the light of the facts revealed, while 
clearly apprehending the unity, personality, 
and unerring justice of God, man has recog- 
nized himself as the miracle of miracles ; has 
learned to know himself in his three-fold 
nature, animal, rational, spiritual ; and to set 
a value on himself as possessed of special 
aptitude for a higher than mere terrestrial 
life. 

Buddhism (to sum up its doctrines as pre- 
sented in the Olcott catechism, which has the 
indorsement of native high priests), teaches 
the highest goodness without a God ; a con- 
tinued existence without what goes by the 
name of soul ; a happiness without an objec- 
tive heaven ; a method of salvation without a 
vicarious Saviour; a redemption by one's 
self as the Redeemer ; and a sumrnum bonum 
attainable in life this side of Nirvana. 

It is plain that one cannot, as swamis are 
urging on the lecture platforms of Greater 
New York to-day, serve both Christ and 
Buddha. Shall it then be the flickering re- 
flected Light of Asia or the Eternal Self- 
luminous Sun of the World ? 



What is Christianity More than Confucianism, 
the Ethical System of China ? 

(Excellent wisdom is found in thee. Dan. v. 14.) 

In the number of its adherents, Confucian- 
ism, the native faith of China, stands second 
to Christianity among the world's great re- 
ligions. There are more Christians to-day than 
believers in any other one creed. Hinduism 
is the third religion in the scale of numerical 
comparison, Buddhism the fourth, and Muham- 
madanism the fifth. In view of its position 
as numerical second among the faiths of the 
earth, as well as by reason of its claim to have 
laid the foundations of the most permanent so- 
cio-political system the world has ever known, 
Confucianism assumes an importance some- 
what out of proportion to any menace it may 
be in itself to Western religious thought. 
Supplement this with the fact that China 
is well embarked in that career of colonizing 
conquest which Napoleon predicted would 
some day move the world, and interest be- 
comes intensified in her positivism as a work- 
ing system ; in the causes of her arrested 
development ; in her ethics, which explains 



94 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES 

and enforces the obligations of the Five 
Human Relationships of prince and minis- 
ter, parent and child, husband and wife, elder 
and younger, friend and friend, and, secondly, 
of the Five Cardinal Virtues of benevolence, 
righteousness, filial piety, ceremony, and faith- 
fulness ; in her claim to teach the universal 
brotherhood of men by her insistence upon 
the negative form of the Golden Rule (What 
you do not like when done to yourself, do 
not to others) ; and in her conception of a 
Supreme Being. 

China prides herself upon her antiquity, 
and her literature carries us back to the re- 
motest past. For all that remains of her an- 
cient letters, the so-called Sacred Books, we 
are indebted to the editorial pen of her phi- 
losopher Kung, or Confucius, the beloved 
teacher, who stands out in bold relief as the 
most distinguished personage in her history. 
Born in an evil age (551 B. C), when cor- 
ruption had sapped the foundations of gov- 
ernment, and misrule and violence were every- 
where rife, Confucius early dedicated himself 
to the cause of social and political reform. 

Tradition relates that in his youth he was of 
so impatient a temper that he could not endure 
the drudgery of learning, and decided to give 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 95 

up literary pursuits for some manual employ- 
ment. One day, as he was returning home 
with a full determination to go to school no 
longer, he happened to pass a half-witted old 
woman who was rubbing a bar of iron on a 
whetstone. Asking the reason of this strange 
proceeding, he learned from her that she had 
lost her knitting-needle and was endeavoring 
to make another by rubbing down the bar. 
Her words acted with magical force upon the 
young philosopher. "If a half-witted old 
woman," he said to himself, " has resolution 
enough to rub down a bar of iron into a 
needle, it would be unworthy of me to dis- 
play less perseverance when the highest hon- 
ors of the Empire are within my reach." 
Inspired with new vigor he returned to his 
books, and in his twenty-second year entered 
upon his labors as a public teacher, opening 
his house as a school for all who wished to 
learn the doctrines of antiquity. His merits 
were recognized ; political positions were 
conferred upon him ; and at last, as minister 
of crime, we find him making heroic efforts 
for the betterment of social conditions. But 
then, as now, reformers were unpopular, and 
the neglect of his sovereign led to his retire- 
ment. For thirteen years Confucius wan- 



96 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES 

dered from state to state, disseminating his 
precepts among the fifteen millions who con- 
stituted the population of what was then 
China. In all this work, the sage claimed to 
be only * a transmitter" believing in and lov- 
ing the ancients, not an original thinker. He 
died at seventy-three, a disappointed man be- 
cause no monarch had appeared to make a 
fair trial of his theory of government. 

Yet after his death his influence was des- 
tined far to exceed his most sanguine expec- 
tations. It has been greater than that of any 
other human teacher. No other has ever 
spoken to so many millions or received such 
honors from posterity. For more than 
twenty centuries, the moral axioms of Con- 
fucius have been taught in the schools of 
China ; educated persons repeat verbatim 
page after page from his classical books; 
and scores of his precepts are familiar to the 
masses, who have positively no other moral 
law to guide them. 

Confucius disclaimed divine inspiration ; 
he made no change in the ancient religion. 
The aboriginal monotheism is occasionally 
reflected in his sayings, but the Almighty 
was "the Unknown God" between whom 
and humanity the philosopher descried no re- 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 97 

lationship. The study of man should suffice 
for man. The existence of the soul after 
death, he admitted ; but as to the nature of 
immortality, he was silent. " While you do 
not know life," he said to an inquiring disci- 
ple, " what can you know about death ? " He 
never suspected that the true reward is not of 
this world. Thus no impulse was given to re- 
ligious thought, and the craving of the human 
soul for certainty as to its future remained un- 
satisfied. Confucius tactfully evaded the 
question of post-mortem consciousness : 
" Were I to say that the departed are pos- 
sessed of consciousness, pious sons might dis- 
sipate fortunes in festivals of the dead ; and 
were I to deny their consciousness, heartless 
sons might leave their fathers unburied." 

The aim of Confucius was to inculcate 
lofty principles of conduct for the govern- 
ment of men in their relations to one another 
and to the ruling powers. The whole duty 
of man was comprised in the performance of 
obligations connected with the Five Rela- 
tionships. Filial piety, fraternal submission, 
and veneration for the men and institutions 
of ancient days, were the foundations of all 
virtuous practices. His golden rule (the sole 
original thought of Confucius) " What you 



98 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES 

do not like when done to yourself, do not 
to others," expressed in written language by 
a single picture letter, was the one word 
(Reciprocity) he specially commended as 
embodying the sum and substance of duty. 

The philosophical writings of Confucius are 
preserved in the form of sayings called An- 
alects ; in books entitled the Great Learning 
and the Doctrine of the Mean ; and in the 
works of Mencius, a disciple and expounder 
of the sage. The Confucian Analects shine 
among the laconics of the world. 

By way of example : — 

" The Master said : ' In the Book of Poetry are three hun- 
dred pieces, but the design of all may be embraced in one 
sentence — Have no depraved thoughts. 

" Those who know the truth are not equal to those who love it. 

" Learning without thought is labor lost ; thought without 
learning is perilous. 

" Good government obtains when those who are near are 
made happy and those who are far off are attracted. 

" Three friendships are advantageous : friendship with the 
upright, friendship with the sincere, and friendship with the 
man of observation. Three are injurious : friendship with the 
man of specious airs, friendship with the insinuatingly soft, 
and friendship with the glib-tongued. Have no friends not 
equal to yourself. 

"Fine words and an ingratiating appearance are seldom 
associated with true virtue. 

" Shall I teach you what knowledge is ? When you know a 
thing, to hold that you know it ; and when you do not know a 
thing, to confess your ignorance,— is knowledge. 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 



99 



" With coarse rice to eat, water to drink, and my bended 
arm for a pillow — I have still happiness even with these ; but 
riches and honors acquired by unrighteousness are to me as a 
floating cloud. 

" What the superior man seeks is in himself ; what the small 
man seeks is in others. The superior man thinks of virtue ; 
the small man thinks of favors which he may receive. The 
superior man is catholic ; the small man is partisan. " 

In the Great Learning, based on the teach- 
ings of Confucius, it is insisted that the wel- 
fare of the people should be the single aim ; 
and the divine right of kings to rule except 
in accordance with the principles of justice 
and virtue, is denied. 

" The ancients who wished to establish illustrious virtue 
throughout the empire," says the Great Learning, " first ordered 
well their own states. Wishing to order well their states, they 
first regulated their families. Wishing to regulate their fami- 
lies, they first cultivated their persons. Wishing to cultivate 
their persons, they first rectified their hearts. 

" From the loving example of one family, a whole state be- 
comes loving; and from its courtesies, the whole state be- 
comes courteous : while from the ambition and perverseness 
of one man, the whole state may be led to rebellious disorder. 
Such is the nature of influence. 

" It is not possible for one to teach others while he cannot 
teach his own family. There is filial piety, there is fraternal 
submission, there is kindness. Therefore the ruler, without 
going beyond his family, completes the lessons far the state. 

" What a man dislikes in his superiors, let him not display in 
the treatment of his inferiors ; what he dislikes in inferiors, let 
him not display in the service of his superiors. What he 
hates in those who are before him, let him not therewith 
precede those who are behind him. What he is unwilling to 



ioo ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES 

receive on the right, let him not bestow on the left. This is 
what is called ' The principle with which, as with a measur- 
ing-square, to regulate one's conduct.' " 

Mencius lived in a degenerate age, but 
without fear or favor threw himself into 
the arena to wrestle with wickedness. Puri- 
fication of heart was his remedy for evil ; 
the sinlessness of childhood, his standard of 
moral purity. " The great man," said Men- 
cius, " is he who does not lose his child's 
heart." Your attention is asked especially to 
this saying : " The noblest thing in the world 
is the people. To them the spirits of the 
earth and the fruits of the earth are inferior. 
The prince is least important of all." 

It will be seen that one prevailing spirit 
breathes through the books of the Chinese, 
a spirit of conservatism. China is guided by 
an ideal constructed for her by Confucius. 
Of this ideal she has never lost sight, and it 
has kept her vast civilization homogeneous 
and held her states together through thou- 
sands of years. But her light has been de- 
rived entirely from the earth, and in this fact 
we must seek the explanation of her ar- 
rested development. She has been without a 
vital principle of growth ; without that spirit 
of progress which has carried our Western 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 101 

civilization transcendently beyond the limit 
reached centuries ago by China — reached in 
letters, reached in fine art, reached in applied 
science, reached in altruism, reached in states- 
manship ! There has been quantity without 
quality. Beauty ? Yes, of a certain pattern, in 
the exquisite forms in porcelain, in the prod- 
ucts of the loom, in the creations of the brush; 
but beauty lacking something — counterfeit 
beauty that fails to thrill the soul, to raise the 
mind above the sphere of the gross and sen- 
suous and fix it on types that stand forever 
as inspirations to high resolve and noble en- 
deavor. And nowhere is the evidence of 
this more marked than in what is called 
Chinese poetry — poetry without inspiration, 
invention, insight — odes, idyls, mere didactic 
verse from which the mind can draw no fire ; 
which do not awaken to the divine side of 
things, nor to the nobility that slumbers in 
human souls. 

Poetry is transfiguration, the transfigura- 
tion of life. The poet remakes the universe* 
and beautiful indeed are the forms of nature 
when transfigured by his God-given power 
As certain vibrations of ether, impinging on 
terrestrial matter, have been transformed into 
heat energy which has become fixed and tan- 



io2 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES 

gible in the diamond crystals of the Kimber- 
ley peridotite, so the aspects and semblances 
of common things that fall continuously on 
the soul of the poet are transfigured by his 
genius, and materialize as so transfigured, 
through an energy intangible, unintelligible, 
divine, in those jewels of verse 

" That on the stretcht fore-finger of all time 
Sparkle forever." 

Thank God that man is gifted with this 
power of transfiguration ! — for it is this seeing 
the Divinity in common things that is the 
most potent instrumentality in keeping alive 
in the heart of man a true love for his Maker. 
It is this faculty of transfiguration which, in 
the providence of God, has been ordained to 
save the world from materialism, positivism, 
indififerentism. Poetry is beauty plus spirit- 
uality ; and its aim is to keep open the path 
that leads from the corporeal to the incor- 
poreal, from the seen to the unseen. It is 
thus a witness-bearer for God. The fact that 
there is poetry is evidence in itself of the 
existence of a Being spiritual, personal, supra- 
natural. The message of Christ and that of 
true poetry are in harmony. 

There is no poetry in China, no suggestion 
by mans imagination, in musical words, of 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 103 

noble grounds for the noblest emotions, be- 
cause there is no high spiritual life. Beauty 
is a mere empty form. Until the home- 
keeping hearts of a nation and the very 
school-children — by whose breath a Talmudic 
writer declared the world may be saved — 
live in the earnestness that springs from a 
union of beauty and spirituality, that nation 
must remain in some degree barbarian in its 
instincts. In China, beauty and spirituality 
are divorced. The standards of desire, the 
objects of aim, the stimuli to action, are there- 
fore the opposite of high and true. There is 
no love of truth for truth's sake. 

The Supreme God of the ancient Chinese 
hymns, the powerful and righteous ruler of 
the universe (Shang Ti), has disappeared 
from the national apprehension, and the 
idealism of the remoter past took its flight 
with monotheism. The Chinaman's spiritual 
nature has become stunted in its develop- 
ment, that part of him which should inspire 
to all higher achievements. The descent 
from primitive monotheism in ancient China 
stimulated the development of two great 
national practices : a formal organized wor- 
ship of God on certain state occasions by 
the Emperor alone in behalf of the masses, 



104 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES 

and a worship of ancestors by the common 
people severally. These two institutions 
have combined to warp the Chinese into the 
matter-of-fact, unideal, backward-looking be- 
ings we know them to be. " In the removal 
from their consciousness of the idea of per- 
sonal relations to God, we recognize the 
withdrawal of that power which under the 
Christian religion exerts a perpetual attrac- 
tion into a higher realm. And in the wor- 
ship of ancestors we have a well-worn chan- 
nel for the continual drawing off of religious 
energy. Ancestor worship has been uniformly 
represented by those who have made a study 
of the underlying motives of the Chinese as 
the immovable thing at the bottom of all 
their immobility. It is the one thing that 
characterizes all the Chinese." * Tablets, 
bearing the name of the departed ancestor, 
the hour of his birth and that of his decease, 
are worshiped twice a month with tapers and 
incense. Death is believed to liberate three 
spirits from the body of flesh ; one occupies 
the grave, another seeks the invisible world, 
the third takes up its habitation in the me- 
morial tablet. This ancestor worship envel- 
ops in gloom every Chinese household, and 

* The Rev. F. H. Johnson in " Positivism as a Working System." 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 105 

assures the permanent rule of the sceptered 
dead. 

The Rev. F. H. Johnson, of Andover, called 
attention in 1883 to the positivism of the Con- 
fucian religion, an oriental prototype of the 
social system of Auguste Comte, which deals 
only with positives, excluding from philoso- 
phy everything but natural phenomena or 
properties of knowable things, and which 
deprecates and discourages all inquiry into 
causes as useless and unprofitable. " Out of 
the conception that the material prosperity 
of the people occupied the highest place in 
the mind of God," he says, " that Shang Ti 
saw with the people's eyes, that the wants of 
the people were the revelation of his will — 
grew as naturally as a widespreading tree 
may grow from a tender shoot, the system 
that makes the central idea of existence, the 
supreme object of devotion to be the 'collect- 
ive good of the collective life/ The very 
same idea, in fact, that at the epoch of the 
French Revolution was made prominent in 
Europe, and subsequently flowered into the 
elaborate social system of Comte, developed 
in China more than four thousand years ago 
that idea of the state which is its exact coun- 
terpart. And as the elevation of this idea to 



106 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES 

the supreme importance usurps the place of 
God in the modern system, so in China it 
quietly and gradually pushed the thought of 
God farther and farther into the distance. 
As the emperor existed for the good of the 
collective life, or state, so also Shang Ti, one 
step higher in the grade of being, existed for 
the same purpose. And if the physical and 
social well-being of the human race was the 
one idea that absorbed the mind of God, it 
should be the absorbing idea of every indi- 
vidual man who would be in harmony with 
the ways of heaven. We have already seen 
with what boldness Mencius laid down the 
doctrine that the people are the most impor- 
tant element in the state, the spirits of the 
land and grain the next, the emperor the 
least. The same course of reasoning was un- 
consciously carried out to include the Ruler 
of Heaven also, as one who, in the highest 
capacity of all, served, and was therefore sub- 
ordinate to, the idea of the state." Thus 
the state becomes the God Supreme in the 
Chinese idea. Confucius was virtually a na- 
tionalist. 

Christianity antagonizes this phase of pos- 
itivism (to continue the quotation) by "its 
individualizing of man. There is no loss of 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 107 

power, as in the worship of the ideal of the 
state, by the conception of divided oppor- 
tunity and divided responsibility. Chris- 
tianity points out a goal to be labored for, 
not by the human race in its corporate capac- 
ity, but one which is to be gained or lost by 
individuals. The destiny of each man, in one 
view, stands by itself. The opportunities of 
life cannot be taken from me by the failure 
of my neighbor to appreciate them. They 
cannot be made fruitful to me by the com- 
bined earnestness of all the other members 
of the community in which I live. My will is 
the arbiter of my destiny. The prospect of 
infinite blessedness and never-ending devel- 
opment thus appeals to each individual, not 
as to a fractional part of the human race, but 
as if he stood alone with God in the universe. 
The Almighty has encompassed him behind 
and before, and laid his hand upon him. ,, 

The Christian conception of God involves 
a belief in an immanent Supreme Being, ap- 
proachable in prayer by every human crea- 
ture, no matter how humble, how sinful, and 
pledged to answer prayer — for spiritual bless- 
ings, absolutely ; for temporal blessings, con- 
tingently, that is, in harmony with the highest 
interests of the petitioner. The God of Chris- 



108 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES 

tianityis near; into his hands we commit all 
our interests ; to his loving care we commend 
our dear ones ; we ask him to appoint our 
lot as seemeth good to his wisdom and love ; 
we trust his Holy Spirit to preserve us from 
our own evil hearts, from such combinations 
of passion and allurement as we cannot, by 
reason of the frailty of our nature, resist. We 
look to him for a higher state of blessedness 
beyond the grave. The eye of the Christian 
is fixed on a future where he has faith that 
great and unsearchable things will be un- 
folded. Christianity is a religion full of as- 
pirations, characterized by an unquenchable 
thirst for more knowledge of God — the God 
whom Confucius may have known but cer- 
tainly did not honor. Christianity adds faith 
in this God to faith in man. It repudiates 
the philosophy that would discard God and 
concentrate enthusiasm exclusively on hu- 
manity. It supplies a motive power that 
Chinese positivism cannot generate; that cold 
morality, " with its stern laws and rigid for- 
mulas, its lofty aim and seemingly unapproach- 
able ideals, must be invested with before it 
can bring the recalcitrant sinner under its 
wholesome and beneficent control — even the 
affectionate heart and the tender appeal of 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 109 

religion." * The moral sense and the religious 
sentiment, distinct in origin, are, when pres- 
ent together, mutually sustaining, reciprocally 
active. It has been wisely said that "moral 
laws are but an expression of the necessities 
of human existence ; and the general agree- 
ment of the ethical codes of the great nations 
of the past is due to the uniformity of the 
conditions of life on the globe." Thus all re- 
ligions have a somewhat similar moral as- 
pect; but it is far from true that they are 
sprung from a common universal system of 
ethics — that morals constitute religion, as 
certain culture-ridden moderns would have 
us believe — that the teachings of Christianity 
are but a reliquary of the ossified ethical pos- 
tulates of dead saints clothed with no higher 
authority than Buddha, Confucius, or Seneca. 
After a life-long study of Chinese character, 
Dr. Legge reaches the conclusion that the 
highest attainments of the followers of Con- 
fucius in moral excellence are not to be com- 
pared with those made by docile learners in 
the school of Christ. It is not strange that 
the discriminating Mencius declared : " That 
whereby man differs from the brute is small, 
and the mass of men cast it away." 

♦ President Hyde, in M Practical Idealism." 



no ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES 

Confucianism, then, is a dreary agnostic 
system. It is without a concrete Christ to 
bring men into closer relationship with an 
almighty Creator and Father. The idea of 
a propitiatory sacrifice is repugnant to its 
philosophy ; hence there are no proper priests 
in China. The Emperor acts as a minister 
of religion for the whole people, who take no 
part in the ceremonial. Christianity, on the 
contrary, accepts the expiatory offices of a 
single High Priest, the Lamb of God, whose 
sacrifice of himself once offered at Calvary — 
once and for all — is a full, perfect, and suffi- 
cient sacrifice, oblation, and satisfaction for 
the sins of the whole world. Hence Chris- 
tianity, not ecclesiastical misinterpretations of 
it, knows no altar, no priesthood, no spiritual 
brokers who make deals for humanity on the 
floor of the Celestial Exchange. It unmis- 
takably teaches that assumption of mediato- 
rial prerogatives implies attempt at subtrac- 
tion from the all-sufficiency of Christ, the 
only Mediator between God and man. 

Confucianism does nothing to promote 
neighbor-love. To be sure the earlier clas- 
sics made reciprocity in practice the rule of 
life ; but reciprocity has two sides. There 
may be mutual animosity as well as mutual 



OF CHRISTIANITY. in 

affection. " Recompense injury with justice," 
said Confucius, and " kindness with kind- 
ness." This is eye-for-eye and tooth-for-tooth 
doctrine, from which has been canceled the 
factor of forgiveness. To be sure it is writ- 
ing kindnesses in marble, but not injuries in 
dust. The man who returns good for evil is 
looked upon in China as a coward ; he does 
it from fear of personal injury. The Con- 
fucian system finds nothing reprehensible in 
revenge. Under the sway of its negative 
Golden Rule official tyranny thrives, frightful 
cruelty, suicide, infanticide, inhuman punish- 
ments that would put to the blush the tor- 
tures of the Spanish Inquisition. The Golden 
Rule in negative form has failed to amelio- 
rate. Jesus gave positive character to the law 
of reciprocity : " Whatsoever ye would that 
men should do to you, do ye even so to 
them." It is distinctively a Do, not a Don't ; 
it is love rampant, not dormant. 

And what has negative reciprocity done 
for woman in China ? She is regarded as a 
necessary evil — men must have mothers. 
She has no rights the superior sex is under 
obligation to respect. Young maidens are 
daily sold into domestic servitude. Young 
women are trafficked in for immoral use. 



ii2 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES 

Girls are bought to be trained for the stage 
by theater-managers who acquire with each 
unfortunate the power to put her to death. 
Children of fifteen are traded in marriage to 
rear generations in slavish submission to ty- 
rannical husbands. Neither Confucius nor 
Mencius said or did anything looking to the 
improvement of the social position of women. 
The married life of the greater philosopher 
was unhappy. Led by her loose conduct to 
divorce his wife, he derived from his own per- 
sonal experience an unfavorable impression 
of the marriage relation, and so speaks con- 
temptuously of conjugal fidelity while giving 
his sanction to concubinage. The test of a 
good wife in China to-day is absence of jeal- 
ousy on her part toward her husband's para- 
mours. 

Confucius lays down a law of chastity for 
wives, from which husbands are exempt. It 
was the white life for one. Christianity rec- 
ognizes no such distinction, but imperatively 
demands a white life for two. It asserts the 
claim that human beings are to find superla- 
tive happiness in the domestic relationships; 
and that the man who is a party to the holy 
covenant of matrimony should be able to 
offer to the woman of his choice exactly what 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 113 

he requires in her, a body and soul unsmirched 
with sexual impurity. This is high ground to 
take, but it is Gods ground. Marriage based 
on any other principle, marriages contracted 
in order to secure worldly comforts and en- 
joyments, marriages that are entered into as 
mere legal or business partnerships, selfish 
and sensual marriage unions — all loveless, 
and obnoxious to the criticism of our Lord 
that in the resurrection they marry not in this 
way, as did the Sadducees of old — such mar- 
riages do not cement affections and make the 
consecrated homes to which angels may be 
believed fondly to stoop. The sanctuary of a 
pure and godly home is closed to the woman 
of China, who has no occasion to bless the 
national religion, the enforcer of her degra- 
dation. 

Chinese women, again, have no right to 
fraternal consideration ; have no mind ot 
their own. Christian women are placed by 
the Founder of their faith on the same foot- 
ing with men in all matters of right — domes- 
tic, social, political. And when Christendom 
itself shall have become Christianized, their 
voices will be heard and their opinions re- 
spected in the council chambers of every 
state. 

8 



ii 4 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES 

Filial piety is the characteristic national 
virtue. Reverence for parents while alive, 
and a show of grief for them when dead, are 
organic duties of Confucianism. But the 
obligation is one-sided, not reciprocal as in 
Christianity. Parental government is tyran- 
nous in the extreme. A father wields abso- 
lute power in his family, a mother-in-law ex- 
acts a galling service. The child must bend 
or break. Confucius went to too great 
lengths in his demands on filial piety, wholly 
indifferent to the fact that the obligation to 
serve father and mother involves reciprocal 
duties on the part of parents. Christianity 
emphasizes the principle that, whereas it is 
incumbent on the child to respect, honor, and 
obey within the limitations of conscience, it 
is binding on the parent to maintain his chil- 
dren properly, to educate them physically, 
intellectually, and morally, and to inculcate 
lessons of love. Christianity condemns all dis- 
qualification of father and mother for their 
high calling as character-formers by worldly 
vocations and avocations — by the follies of 
fashion, the exactions of business, the de- 
mands of club life. It denies to the heartless 
women who style themselves society's queens 
the right to squander in aimless indolence or 






OF CHRISTIANITY. n 5 

gratification of self the time that belongs to 
their offspring. It rebukes those self-seeking 
men who are so impatient of contact with 
sinlessness and innocence that they find it 
irksome to unbend to the little souls God has 
placed in their charge. And it pronounces 
the secret of that ideal training which makes 
a heaven of home to be the combination and 
cooperation of a manly, intelligent, unselfish, 
chivalric fatherhood and a gentle, self-deny- 
ing, patient, dignified motherhood, in and 
through a Heaven-founded and Heaven- 
blessed unity. 

Finally, the third element of Christianity 
most conspicuously lacking in Confucianism 
is Progress. With progress the religion of 
China has no sympathy. China was all the 
world to Confucius, who is largely responsi- 
ble for the national exclusiveness of which 
the Great Wall is a symbol. There was noth- 
ing beyond that wall worthy of the attention 
and emulation of a Chinaman. The Museum 
of Confucianism has always been its own 
stenosed and insufficient heart. There is no 
spirit of upward and outward growth, de- 
scribed as " the spirit which is ever struggling 
to express and realize itself in higher forms, 
which promises to the human race far more 



n6 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES 

than it has ever yet accomplished, which leads 
men on with visions and hopes, which does 
not suffer them to be satisfied, but which 
makes them restless, daring, willing to risk 
all for the sake of an ideal good." This is 
the spirit of Christianity, the spirit that ex- 
plains Western supremacy. But the people 
who are moral and nothing more, never ex- 
pand, never climb out of the trench into 
which they have settled. They become crys- 
tallized according to some law of intellectual 
physics. For them, life does not broaden and 
deepen and intensify, eternity has no charms, 
heaven no reality. " Excellent wisdom " 
alone is inadequate. 

China needs a religion that reveals the 
eternal God and presents the high ideals of 
Christianity to the boyish minds of its mil- 
lions, — the superstition-dispersing gospel of 
Jesus Christ, whose thought of a Father God 
and a concrete Redeemer must bring peace 
and satisfaction to the souls that contemplate 
an impossible moral perfection. What Con- 
fucius left unfinished, Christianity is now 
called upon to complete. The heart of our 
nation warms to-day toward a race that has 
long been represented among us, a people 
that is becoming the national drudge, nay 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 117 

more, that is aiding us to win our battles in 
the southern seas. Earnest men and women 
are endeavoring to make it easy for the chil- 
dren of the Celestial Empire to fall in love 
with Jesus Christ; for Chinese raw material, 
when shaped on Western looms and dyed 
with the pure tints of Christian doctrine, is 
second to none. Waked from the sleep of 
centuries, in a happy forgetfulness of its time- 
honored exclusive policy, the conservative 
race is asking for light, for education, social 
regeneration, soul-peace. God speed the 
efforts making in the world to-day to bring 
into the family of Christ the greatest nation- 
ality of the East ! 



What is Christianity More than Muhammadanism, 
the Monotheistic Religion of the Koran ? 

(Being predestinated according to the purpose of Him who work- 
eth all things after the counsel of his own will. Eph. i. n. 
Woman is the glory [not the merchandise] of man. I Cor. xi. 7.) 

At the Parliament of Religions convened 
at the City of Chicago in 1893, reference 
was made to the progress of Islamism in the 
United States ; and it is not to be frivolously- 
passed over that the religion of Muhammad, 
divested of its wonted savagery and never 
so winsome and debonair, is at this very 
hour conducting an intellectual crusade 
among the nations that stripped it of its 
prestige in the holy wars of mediaeval times. 
The drowning man is clutching at the tradi- 
tional straw. Muhammadan missionaries 
are abroad, striving to convince the unen- 
lightened and restless populations of central 
Europe, as well as the credulous elements of 
American society, that there is but one self- 
active mind in the universe and a single all- 
dominant Allah, or Will — thus striking at the 
primal psychological truths of soul-immor- 
tality and self-activity of human intellect, and 



EVIDENCES OF CHRISTIANITY. 119 

teaching submission to blind fate with the 
implied abdication of reason. 

Many ill-balanced minds are appropriat- 
ing the deftly cast baits and considering the 
advisability of " turning Turk ; " so that ear- 
nest Christians would seem to be under obli- 
gation to fit themselves for effective combat 
with this subtle phase of what has been 
called "the new Enlightenment." It is my 
purpose this morning to discuss those char- 
acteristic features of El Islam that are irrec- 
oncilably opposed to the spirit and teach- 
ings of Christianity, and to inquire into the 
claim of this religion to represent a bona fide 
step in the spiritual evolution of man. 

Arabia gave birth to the founder of El Is- 
lam, " the Saving Faith." Among some of 
the nomad tribes who made this peninsula 
their home, the rites and tenets of Judaism 
prevailed, though in a form more or less cor- 
rupted; others had become adherents ol 
Christianity, first introduced into their 
country by the preaching of St. Paul, but at 
this time a mere caricature of the faith of the 
gospels. On the northeastern frontier, th< 
fire-worship of the Persians had gained a 
foothold; but by far the greatest number 
adored as gods the heavenly bodies or 



i2o ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES 

graven images erected to their honor in 
temples and groves. 

In Mecca, the sacred city of the Arabs, 
was born, in the year 569, Muhammad, who 
by uniting his countrymen on the basis of a 
common faith laid the foundation of their 
greatness. In early life an humble mer- 
chant, as he approached middle age he 
became subject to attacks of melancholia, 
during which, he stated, the angel Gabriel 
appeared to him, communicated a new rev- 
elation, and commanded him to proclaim it 
to the world. 

The principal points of this faith are found 
in the Koran (Recitation or Reading), which 
the pretended prophet gave to his country- 
men and which they accepted as their sacred 
book, precipitated piece by piece from a 
Mother Bible in Heaven, and issued in fly- 
leaves by Muhammad. The Koran is made 
up of 114 Suras, or divisions; a mingle- 
mangle of rabbinical legends and biblical 
lore, with no claim to originality beyond the 
modus inspirandi. Perusal of it insures as- 
sent to Carlyle's characterization : " A wea- 
risome, crude, confused jumble, incondite ; 
endless iterations, long-windedness, entan- 
glement ; insupportable stupidity, in short ! 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 121 

Nothing but a sense of duty could carry any 
European through the Koran." Hunting 
for usable stuff among its chattocks is far 
from remunerative. 

The Koran, however, clearly teaches that 
there is but one God, by whom divers proph- 
ets — Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, Jesus, 
and Muhammad, the last and greatest of all 
— had been sent to instruct the human race. 
Christ, the son of Mary, is not God nor 
equal to God, only an apostle. To the as- 
surance that every man has his appointed 
time to die, it adds a promise of eternal hap- 
piness to those who may perish in propagat- 
ing the faith. Unbelievers are to suffer for- 
ever ; but all " the faithful " will be cleansed 
from their sins, however great, by a longer 
or shorter period of punishment, and be 
finally admitted to a paradise of sensual 
pleasures. There they shall dwell in marble 
palaces, attired in silken robes, surrounded 
by fruits and flowers, and rivers of wine, and 
women of resplendent beauty. 

Emanuel Deutsch defines Islam as Juda- 
ism adapted to Arabia, plus the apostleship 
of Jesus and Muhammad ; and he bids us 
look for its source in the Talmud — not that 
Muhammad ever heard of this delightful 



122 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES 

Jewish encyclopedia enlivened with parables, 
jests, and fairy stories, but that the Jews he 
knew, and on whose Judaism he founded 
Islam, were Talmudic in their forms of be- 
lief and social practices. No doubt, the in- 
fluence of this Judaism was vastly stronger 
than that of the distorted or pseudo-Christi- 
anity of the Arabian tribes, which had de- 
generated into Mariolatry or hero worship, 
and whose professors Muhammad justly de- 
nounced as idolatrous. 

A friend* who spent the past winter and 
spring in Muhammadan countries, and has 
been thrown into companionship with intel- 
ligent missionaries of quarter century service, 
brings back this answer to my query, " What 
is the best that Islamism has done, or is do- 
ing, for humanity ? " I quote from her letter 
the statement of the Rev. Dr. Alexander, of 
the United Presbyterian Church of America, 
Vvho is stationed at Assioot on the Nile : 
" Muhammadanism has brought the mind to 
a belief in the unity of God, and tried to dis- 
abuse it of a faith in idols ; and it has in the 
past taken a stand for total abstinence, as the 
Koran positively prohibits the use of strong 
drink ; but," he continued, " the tenets of the 

* Miss Evelina S. Hamilton, of New York. 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 123 

religion are a dead letter ; intemperance pre- 
vails and saint-worship is winked at. The 
whole system is on the decline, having no 
hold for good on the people, who in the re- 
bound are lapsing into infidelity of the rank- 
est kind." " The worst phase of Muhammad- 
anism," Dr. Alexander said, "is its attitude 
toward woman. Polygamy is the rule. Any 
man in moderate circumstances may have 
four wives (the Sultan has a new wife every 
year). Divorce is allowable for the merest 
trifle ; and when a wife is thus put aside a 
new one is at once found to complete the al- 
lotted number. It is not uncommon for a 
man of thirty or thirty-five to have had forty 
wives. Women are uneducated ; and as 
they are often cast adrift, with no resources, 
life becomes to them an intolerable burden. ,, 
"At Beyrout," my friend adds, "we dined 
with Professor Porter, who has been for 
twenty-five years connected with the Ameri- 
can College in that city. Professor Porter 
declared that he could see no way in which 
Muhammadanism was of benefit to humanity, 
as the whole system was one stupendous 
falsehood from beginning to end. While in 
Damascus we attended service at the Irish 
mission with which Dr. Crawford, an Atueri- 



I2 4 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES 

can evangelist, has been associated for forty 
years. After service, I had a conversation 
with Dr. Crawford, who declared that the in- 
fluence of Muhammadanism was everywhere 
demoralizing ; that while it teaches a belief 
in one God, it fabricates so many lies about 
what this God requires of mankind that his 
commandments mean nothing; for the Koran 
as interpreted at present gives the greatest 
possible latitude to human depravity." The 
Rev. William Jessup, of Zahleh, who with his 
young wife has consecrated life to missionary 
work in Syria, confirmed these views, and in 
addition spoke of the intolerance of Muham- 
madanism, which exterminates other religions 
that oppose it, and crushes with oppressive 
measures those that seek to thrive beside it. 
Islamism, then, in the opinion of those 
who have studied it most recently on its na 
tive soil, as well as in the experience of mis- 
sionaries who have been in touch with it fo 
a quarter century or more, has done 
nothing for humanity except to darken and 
deprave. The cause of this, as I apprehend 
it, lies : first, in its doctrine of fatalism ; sec- 
ondly, in its insistence on the chattelism of 
woman ; and, thirdly, in its divorce of moral- 
ity from religion. 



: 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 125 

Islam means submission to the will of 
Allah no matter how tyrannical, hopeless 
surrender to an eternally foreordained order 
of things. Muhammadans believe in Fate ; 
Christians, in Providence. It has been as- 
serted that Islam shares its fatalism with 
Christianity, "for creative omnipotence is but 
another name for fatalism." This is sophis- 
try. It is true that predestination is taught 
in Scripture, notably in Romans viii., " For 
whom he foreknew he also foreordained to 
be conformed to the image of his Son." And 
in Ephesians i., God " hath chosen us . . . be- 
fore the foundation of the world, . . . having 
foreordained us unto adoption as sons 
through Jesus Christ." How is this to be 
interpreted ? The seventeenth Article of Re- 
ligion defines predestination to life as " the 
everlasting purpose of God, whereby he hath 
constantly decreed, by his counsel secret to 
us, to deliver from curse and damnation 
those whom he hath chosen in Christ out of 
mankind; and to bring them by Christ to 
everlasting salvation as vessels made to 
honor." The Greek pronoun o^ translated 
u whom," describes a body of believers con- 
sidered collectively, and not severally as in- 
dividuals. Such predestination takes not 



i26 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES 

away mans free agency and responsibility, 
which the Scriptures positively affirm. God 
foreordained from the beginning a great 
company of human souls to pass triumphant- 
ly through this life of probation, and thus 
be rendered fit for companionship with the 
Lamb through eternity, in place of the angels 
who fell by transgression. He has promised 
absolutely to give his grace to all who ask 
in a sincere desire for aid to join that com- 
pany of the elect. All men may be saved, if 
they please, by faith in Jesus Christ, whose 
Church is charged with the sacred mission of 
commanding them everywhere to repent. 

Calvin taught in his " Institutes" that God 
has decreed the future ; that man falls ac- 
cording to appointment of divine providence, 
but always by his own fault. Beza, the suc- 
cessor of Calvin, dared to proclaim that " the 
Almighty created a portion of men to be his 
instruments with the intent of carrying out 
through them his evil designs." This is 
ultra doctrine. God has never played the 
role of tempter. 

Christianity is antipodal to Muhammadan- 
ism in that its very essence is freedom, inde- 
pendence of compelling cause. It has always 
permitted and encouraged the freest exercise 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 127 

of the intellect. A characteristic primitive 
fact of mind, to which every man's con- 
sciousness testifies, is that not only mind or 
spirit exists, preserving a conscious identity 
through all its changes and modifications, 
and hence is a single, indivisible, intelligent 
entity, capable of existence apart from this 
body ; but that such mind, soul, self, spirit, 
or Ego, is essentially self-active — spontane- 
ously (of itself) thinks, feels, and wills, and 
not through the agency or compulsion of 
some higher Mind or Over-Soul. And, what 
is more to the point, every Christian is re- 
peatedly aware that he is acting in direct 
opposition to a divine Mind which is con- 
straining him to follow some different course. 
Our God foreknows, but does not fore- 
compel. There is an unequivocal difference. 
It is inconceivable that the Almighty should 
legislate against murder, for instance, and 
then force a man to kill. Every mother in 
the land who has two children essentially 
differing in character relatively foreknows 
what each will do under the stress of passion 
and allurement. The one will be sure to 
yield, the other to resist. And yet this 
mother puts forth all the energies of her love 
to save the weaker child. She well fore- 



128 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES 

knows but does not fore-compel. What is 
relative foreknowledge in the case of an 
earthly parent is absolute with God. Such 
is the teaching of Christianity. 

Nature is spoken of by the scientist as a 
domain of rigid law, and man is the only 
child of nature that can comprehend that 
law. Because of this, his destiny is in his 
own hands, for he can direct and utilize the 
forces of nature. So argues the biologist. 
By analogy, man's spiritual destinies are 
within his control. Thank God it is so 
ordained ; for nothing is more chilling to 
spiritual expansion than a belief in one un- 
alterable destiny. " There are two ways of 
looking at Gods will," said Drummond ; "one 
at the love side of it, the other at the law ; 
one ending in triumph, the other in despair; 
the one a liberty, the other a slavery." With- 
out such liberty of the human will, which St. 
Paul taught equally with the absolute sover- 
eignty of God, character-formation, ordered 
of God, were impossible. 

Secondly, let us examine the influence of 
the Muhammadan religion on woman. Its 
whole spirit tends to oppress her sex. Her 
" little soul," as it is designated, seems hardly 
worthy of consideration. She is so degraded 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 129 

that she has ceased to value herself. The 
women of the higher harams are a dejected, 
discontented set, with no object or employ- 
ment in life ; and they who enter the seraglio 
of the Sultan leave hope behind them, for 
they know that the " Devil's Current " in the 
Bosporus sweeps to a watery tomb all in- 
mates who survive their charms. 

Muhammad was an apostle of unbridled 
lust and dealt infamously with the gentler 
sex, regarding woman as the mere instru- 
ment of mans passion. He tempted his 
dupes to war by promising a distribution 
among them of maiden captives. He gave 
loose rein to the slave trade, that his follow- 
ers might provide themselves through its 
channels with a miscellany of mistresses. 
He married seventeen wives himself, and 
was the owner of hundreds of odalisques. 
He excluded women from the mosques, and 
thus drew to the dregs the wine of moral life. 
His system cast a pestilent shadow over 
domestic happiness, and still is freighted 
with its loathsome fruit of wife-purchase and 
polygamy. Dr. Peters states in "Nippur" 
that, according to the Muhammadan idea, 
marriage is nothing more than a business 

transaction. The Arabs in the vicinity ot 
9 



t3o ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES 

the excavations haggle over the price of a 
woman as if she were a mere commodity. 
Sixty dollars buys a wife of extra quality ; 
forty dollars, a fair article at Nippur. The 
minimum price for a woman in the East is 
less than two dollars in our money. A wife 
so purchased is regarded as a chattel, the 
personal property of her husband, the de- 
fenseless victim of his lechery and truculence. 
Despite its appropriation of Talmudic adorn- 
ments, Muhammadanism has overlooked one 
gem that glistens in the Talmud : " It is wom- 
an alone through whom the blessings of 
Heaven are vouchsafed to a house. Men 
should be careful lest they cause her to weep, 
for God counts her tears." 

In contrast to the attitude of Muhammad 
is that of Christ. Everywhere in the Gospel 
story is woman treated by her Saviour as a 
social equal, as a companion worthy of his 
sympathy and entitled to his counsel, as a 
ministering angel in his daily walks and be- 
fore his cross of agony, as a confidante and 
witness at the empty sepulcher. Jesus re- 
garded woman as much an individual as 
man, as much a unit in Church and home 
and nation. He recognized in Martha of 
Bethany the anxious housewife who grandly 



OF CHRISTIANITY. i« 

serves in all the duties and employments 
of home life; in Mary her sister, the spir- 
itual side of womanhood, that rises from 
the earthly to the heavenly and is lost in 
contemplation of the Divine ; in Mary Mag- 
dalene, the strength of womanly devotion, 
the trust that bridges the gulf of death ; in 
Mary the Forgiven, the depth of holy con- 
trition. Woman in the Gospel system is 
made the equal of man in every question of 
privilege ; endowed by her Maker with power 
to choose her own course of action, with a 
right to the same consideration as a social 
and intellectual unit, to the same educational 
advantages, to the same opportunities of 
making a livelihood, to the same compensa- 
tion for equally good work. Where does 
God make any distinction between the obli- 
gations binding upon man and those incum- 
bent upon woman? Is not the moral law 
uttered for the good and observance of both ? 
Have the promises of this Bible any refer- 
ence to differences of sex ? 

I say it reverently, if Jesus Christ had 
walked among men in this democratic age 
he would, I believe, have given more positive 
expression to a tenet that is deeply imbedded 
in his divine philosophy, even universal suf- 



132 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES 

frage at the polls of the nations — suffrage 
that does not exclude superior intellect and 
taxed property interests from their right to 
representation in the legislative chamber 
simply because in the providence of God 
they happen to be the endowments of woman. 
Psychological science is here in accord with 
Christian teaching ; for it demonstrates and 
importunes us to believe that each one of us, 
without regard to sex, is a self-conscious 
unit, capable of self-examination, self-criti- 
cism, self-consistency, cast in the image of 
the Mind Infinite, trammeled by no limitation 
to its development, with no horizon to the 
evolution of its deathless powers. 

Marriage with the Muhammadans is a 
civil act, dissoluble at the pleasure of the 
husband. A wife that cloys the appetite or 
taste may be divorced without the slightest 
disloyalty on her part and without the assign- 
ment of any reason by her husband, who has 
only to say in the presence of a third party, 
" I divorce you. Begone !" The dragoman 
of the party just referred to was an Egyp- 
tian Muhammadan who had divorced two 
wives. One was only fourteen years old 
when he married her ; but her mother had a 
way of leaving the door ajar which was 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 135 

annoying to him, so he divorced his young 
wife lest she should inherit the same trait. 
The second wife was accustomed to shed 
tears when he left home in the prosecution 
of his calling. Interpreting this as a sign of 
bad luck, he dissolved their marriage with 
the utmost sang-froid. 

To the Muhammadan, conjugal love is an 
unknown quantity. He is utterly dead to 
the divine instinct which prompts an un- 
reserved psychical as well as physical union 
of two intelligent beings of opposite sex, two 
complementary personalities who find in 
love the hearts blood of their mutual faith. 
There is no realization of Tennyson's beauti- 
ful thought : 

" Either sex alone 
Is half itself, and in true marriage lies 
Nor equal, nor unequal: each fulfills 
Defect in each, and always thought in thought, 
Purpose in purpose, will in will, they grow, 
The single, pure, and perfect animal, 
The two-cell'd heart, beating with one full stroke 
Life." 

In no system of religion, ethics, or phi- 
losophy is there a conception of the mar- 
riage relation approaching in nobility that 
of Jesus Christ. He looked upon marriage 
as vastly more than a mere animal living- 
together. With him, it is a union of bodies 



i 3 4 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES 

and souls ; a compact rational, moral, and 
grandly spiritual. There is not the slightest 
insinuation in his teachings of woman's in- 
feriority to her husband. 

And Christ's law makes marriage dissolu- 
ble for the one specific cause of proved un- 
faithfulness alone. There is in the Christian 
Church no " free divorce" which disunites 
married pairs because of incompatibility or 
failure to fulfill any of the obligations of 
marriage as interpreted by the state. What- 
ever may be the ruling of the civil law, the 
Church of Christ can never sanction the put- 
ting asunder of those whom God has joined, 
except for the one cause defined so precisely 
by its Founder. Bishops may indeed give 
permission for remarriage on the part of 
those divorced for causes other than adul- 
tery, but their notes of indulgence will be 
protested when presented on high. The 
only rational basis of marriage from the 
Christian outlook is affection, love in each 
party to the contract stronger than that 
entertained for any other human being. " For 
this cause," said Jesus (Matt. xix. 5), "shall 
a man leave his father and mother, and shall 
[literally] be glued to the woman of his 
choice [here Christ assumes that an engage- 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 135 

ment is as sacred as a marriage], and the two 
shall be one flesh." 

This spiritual side of marriage is hidden 
from the eyes of the Muhammadan husband, 
this love side of marriage is undreamed of 
by the Muhammadan wife — the love that 
springs in the heart of Christian woman ; 
so disinterested, so ingenuous, so near when 
most forgotten, so wise, so steadfast. What 
man will say that he has ever been able to 
overdraw his account with this love, that his 
drafts have ever been dishonored ? What 
man will claim his worthiness of such devo- 
tion, or urge his ability ever to requite it ? 

" The love of woman quivering to the blast 
Through every nerve ; yet rooted deep and fast 
Midst life's dark sea." 

This is the love that makes home sacred and 
motherhood beautiful. There is no man 
who is not susceptible to its influence, who 
cannot be saved from a downward career 
by the strength and affection of true woman- 
hood. I am sure that if American woman, 
from her of the squalid tenement to her of 
the burnished mansion, would make home 
what God intended it should be, there would 
be no need of crusading against saloons, 
for the hearthstone would possess superior 



i 3 o ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES 

attractions to the public bar ; there would be 
no demands for legislation to authorize the 
sale of alcoholic drinks in clubs and corner 
hells on the Sabbath ; there would be no 
such attempted insult of Him who spoke 
the word, alike to man and woman, " Thou 
shalt not commit adultery," as the offering 
of bills in our legislatures to legalize prosti- 
tution in the great cities of the United States! 
Never, if the American mother would but 
prayerfully study her duty, and fearlessly 
and unremittingly discharge it! 

Therefore I feel that all we can do to edu- 
cate American women up to a sense of their 
responsibility, all we can do to fit them by 
college education coupled with Christian 
training (divorce one from the other, and 
your higher education but turns a girl into a 
selfish prig, estranges her affections from her 
parents, and teaches her that it is a mark of 
advancement to say, not in her heart, but 
openly and with a sneer at believers, " There 
is no God, and every man is his own Christ ,, ) ) 
— therefore I say, all we can do to fit young 
women by college education coupled with re- 
ligious training for their noble work as re- 
formers of society must hasten the consum- 
mation we all devoutly hope and pray for. 



OF CHRISTIANITY. i 37 

Assuredly, when we come to think of it, the 
national force that has for generations been 
wasted in America is woman ; and we have 
cause for rejoicing that at the close of this 
nineteenth century, preeminently "woman's 
century," it has come to be recognized that 
no nation can be truly great in which the 
rights of woman are not upheld, and her re- 
fined intellect is not respected as a directing 
agency and an impelling power. 

Finally, Christianity is, as we have seen, a 
moral as well as a rational religion. Confu- 
cianism, it will be remembered, exalts moral- 
ity at the expense of religion. Muhammad- 
anism plainly exalts religion at the expense 
of morality. There is about each of the lat- 
ter systems a fatal dissymmetry. Both have 
in consequence antagonized progress ; both 
have failed to make good at the soul's depths. 
Muslims assume no moral obligations and 
simply live for the present, the Koran incul- 
cating a belief in fate which destroys all con- 
cern for the future. And indeed, as Maeter- 
linck asks, can any true sentiment of the 
future ever come to the man who has not had 
his resting-place in some pure woman's heart ? 
Amid an environment of popular wrongdoing 
and political oppression, the votaries of El 



138 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES 

Islam seek satisfaction in the thought of their 
religious superiority to other nations. It is 
as a Pasha said in the hearing of my friend 
Adams, the missionary, " True, we are great 
scoundrels in Turkey — but, thank God ! we 
have the true faith." 

In divorcing morality from religion Mu- 
hammadanism destroys that refined ethic 
sense which is the appropriate soil for the 
growth of spiritual sentiment. It reacts to 
congeal the conscience, presents immoral 
motives for conduct, and has naturally ended 
in formalism and moral paresis. 

Christianity cherishes the spiritual aspect 
of human relationships, while Muhammadan- 
ism grovels in the carnal. The latter is a 
religion of self-gratification, the former a re- 
ligion of self-sacrifice. War and sensuality 
shaped Arab destiny. El Islam blazed into 
savage frenzy which swept over Europe in a 
whirlwind of fire. The Koran teaches a re- 
ligion of violence. The key of El Islam to 
mens hearts was the scimitar ; the key of 
Christianity is the soft word that turneth 
away wrath and persuadeth to brotherly feel- 
ing and action. The spinal cord of the sys- 
tem of Muhammad was fanatical zeal ; the 
impulse that flashed through its motor fibers 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 139 

to the outer world incited the activities of 
fear. The scheme was cunningly devised to 
play upon the apprehensions and supersti- 
tions of men. The Koran encourages slav- 
ery, concubinage, and murder, as means of 
propagandism. The Bible accompanies the 
injunction to disseminate its faith with prom- 
ises of future spiritual gratifications. The 
divine Paymaster of Christianity compensates 
in eternity. 

There can be no greater contrast between 
Christianity and El Islam than that which 
marks the plans of the two religions for the 
reconciliation of man with God. The one — 
salvation through the atoning blood of Jesus 
— is declared to be the purpose from eternity 
of an all-wise, all-prescient, all-pitying Crea- 
tor, immanent in the universe, accessible 
through Christ, identical in spiritual nature 
with man who is made in his image and 
hence is immortal, ever inviting the chil- 
dren of men to personal relationship with 
himself and preparing them for such relation- 
ship by the development of religious instincts 
in their souls. 

The contra-God of El Islam is remote ; 
sagacious and just, but out of reach, nebular ; 
without love, with no scheme of atonement 



i4o ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES 

for human sin as the chevisance of such love. 
Muhammad ridiculed the idea of Christ's sac- 
rifice. It were unworthy of Allah, says the 
Koran, to have a child, to become incarnated 
in a son whose human life should be given 
for humanity. Hence the Muhammadan be- 
lief that it devolves on man himself to propi- 
tiate offended Deity ; hence the system of ac- 
cumulating credit, of banking a surplus of 
merit in heaven by acts of hospitality, and 
the like, on earth. Muhammadanism, like 
Buddhism, virtually makes the individual 
man the author of his own salvation ; and in 
so doing it is vaunted to teach the inherent 
dignity and worth of human nature. 

Be not deceived by the rose-colored pic- 
tures of El Islam drawn by chauvinistic self- 
seekers. We are not to judge of a faith by 
a few moral or psychical principles. Bosworth 
Smith appropriately said, in a famous speech : 
" The religion of Christ contains whole fields 
of morality and whole realms of thought 
which are all outside the religion of Muham- 
mad. It opens to mans moral nature humil- 
ity, purity of heart, forgiveness of injuries. 
Its ideal life is most elevating, most majestic, 
most inspiring." 

Muhammadanism is putrid to the medulla. 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 141 

It contains no element that makes for right- 
eousness Its influence on civilization has 
ever been withering. It aborts all tenden- 
cies to a higher culture. Its characteristic 
sequelae are intellectual torpor complicated 
with moral anaesthesia It cannot be Chris- 
tianized By no conceivable compromise can 
the two faiths, each an aspirant to the sway 
of the world, be merged in a common reli- 
gion. Education alone will break the shackles 
of the Muslim ; translation from his narrow 
sphere of bigotry, intolerance, and self-conceit 
to the broader, purer, grander, open-handed, 
free-hearted life of the outside world of prog- 
ress and enlightenment. And the meridian 
of this schooling must be reached in his 
abandonment of the religion of sense and 
fate and his acceptance of the religion of rea- 
son as projected in the gospel of Jesus Christ. 
Man is man only through his control by this 
highest faculty of intellect. 

" Man is not the prince of creatures 
But in reason ; fail that, he is worse 
Than horse, or dog, or beast of wilderness." 

— Nathaniel Field* 



What is Christianity More than Theosophy? 

(Jesus saith : " I stood in the midst of the world, and I found all 
men drunken ; and my soul grieveth over the sons of men because 
they are blind in their hearts." Gospel according to the Egyptians, 
Third Logion.) 

Extraordinary interest is manifesting 
today, not only among European nations but 
throughout our own country as well, in an- 
cient Hindu mysticism. Minds in unstable 
equilibrium — the inquisitive and adventurous 
element that cultivates stances, exhibitions of 
thought-transference, and whatever is new or 
radical in philosophy, with a view to glean- 
ing some knowledge of the occult world or, 
as they say, of penetrating the true relation- 
ship of man to the universe — are easily 
fanned into flame by teachers of Mahatma- 
ism, Blavatskyism, and other strange phases 
of thought, who claim to be specially qualified 
or specially privileged to pry into the Divine 
nature. 

While Western science is tending to mate- 
rialism — a materialism that attributes all 
psychical phenomena (all shades of thinking, 
feeling, and willing) to enormously compli- 
cated forms of motion ; that characterizes 



ENEMIES OF CHRISTIANITY. 143 

affection, faith, hope, fear, as only molec- 
ular changes in the gray matter of the brain, 
and reduces thought to phosphorus, thus 
justifying Carlyle's definition of it as a Phi- 
losophy of Dirt — while Western science has 
this trend, various antiquated superstitions 
are reviving not only in the purlieus but at 
the intellectual centersof Christendom, — mag- 
ical and Eleusinian practices, alchemy, nat- 
ural astrology advertising its ability to deter- 
mine individual destinies from configurations 
of planets and stars, palmistry, the science of 
the divining-rod, professed intercourse with 
demons and with the dead. These and many 
others, dredged up from the mud of ancient 
spiritual crime and washed of their telltale 
stains, are being foisted on a receptive pub- 
lic as the novel results of recent scientific in- 
vestigation. 

" Unless we mistake the signs," says the 
author* of " Isis Unveiled," "the day is ap- 
proaching when the world will receive the 
proofs that only ancient religions were in 
harmony with nature and ancient science 
embraced all that can be known. An era 
of disenchantment and rebuilding will soon 
begin — nay, has already begun. The cycle 

* Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky. 



i 4 4 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES 

has almost run its course ; and the future 
pages of history may contain full evidence, 
and convey full proof, that 

1 If ancestry can be in aught believed, 
Descending spirits have conversed with man, 
And told him secrets of the world unknown.' " 

During the last few years, what is called 
Theosophy, or Theosophical Philosophy, 
"the Secret Doctrine," has made startling 
headway, following in the wake of Spiritism 
and claiming to contain the essence of 
ancient Indie wisdom. It is practically Oc- 
cultism, defined by A. P. Sinnett as "not 
merely an isolated discovery showing human- 
ity to be possessed of certain powers over 
Nature, which the narrower study of Nature 
from the merely materialistic standpoint has 
failed to develop ; it is an illumination cast 
over all previous spiritual speculation, of a 
kind which knits together apparently diver- 
gent systems. It is to spiritual philosophy 
much what Sanscrit was found to be to com- 
parative philology ; it is a common stock of 
philosophical roots. Judaism, Christianity, 
Buddhism, and the Egyptian theology, are 
thus brought into one family of ideas." * 

Modern Theosophy owes its origin to a 

* kk The Occult World." 



OF CHRISTIANITY. i 45 

Russian adventuress, Madame Blavatsky, 
the professed messenger of its custodians, 
who, after devoting herself for more than 
thirty years to occult pursuits, came to New 
York in 1875 anc * there organized the Theo- 
sophical Society under the presidency of one 
Henry S. Olcott. The objects of the Society 
are set forth as follows : 

I. To form the nucleus of a Universal 
Brotherhood of Humanity, without distinc- 
tion of race, creed, sex, caste, or color. 

II. To study Aryan literature, religion, and 
science. 

III. To investigate unexplained laws of 
Nature, and the latent powers of man. 

Subsequently a fourth object of the soci- 
ety, the destruction of Christianity, was re- 
vealed. To quote Blavatsky : " Later it has 
determined to spread among the 'poor be- 
nighted heathen ' such evidences as to the 
practical results of Christianity as will at least 
give both sides of the story to the communi- 
ties among which missionaries are at work. 
With this view it has established relations 
with societies and individuals throughout the 
East, to whom it furnishes authenticated re- 
ports of the ecclesiastical crimes and misde- 
meanors, schisms and heresies, controversies 
10 



146 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES 

and litigations, doctrinal differences and Bib- 
lical criticisms and revisions, with which the 
press of Christian Europe and America con- 
stantly teems. Christendom has been long 
and minutely informed of the degradation 
and brutishness into which Buddhism, Brah- 
manism, and Confucianism have plunged 
their deluded votaries, and many millions 
have been lavished upon foreign missions 
under such false representations. The The- 
osophical Society, seeing daily exemplifica- 
tions of this very state of things as the se- 
quence of Christian teaching and example — 
the latter especially — thought it simple jus- 
tice to make the facts known in Palestine, 
India, Ceylon, Cashmere, Tartary, Thibet, 
China, and Japan, in all which countries it 
has influential correspondents." The malev- 
olence here is unmistakable. 

The Theosophical Society now numbers 
some five thousand members in Europe, Asia, 
and the United States — as a rule imperfectly 
educated, marvel-mongering charlatans. It 
supports scores of magazines in various lan- 
guages, and representative " branches " to dis- 
seminate its blasphemous teachings in all 
corners of the globe. 

Blavatsky professed to have received her 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 147 

revelations from a brotherhood of sages 
called Mahatmas, resident in an oasis of the 
Desert of Gobi, who informed her that the 
advances of modern science, and especially 
the spread of evolutionary philosophy, had at 
last fitted the world for the reception of their 
profound teachings. So she was deputed to 
act as an intermediary between theoutside pub- 
lic and the masters immersed in philosophic 
meditation — and so etherealized by their 
melancholic stupor as to be unable to endure 
contact with coarse human nature. In league 
with this impostor were Monsieur and 
Madame Coulomb, who accompanied her to 
India and were installed as managers of her 
nefarious business at Madras. Money ex- 
torted from rich dupes was expended to equip 
a house with all the paraphernalia of decep- 
tion ; and every artifice was enlisted to 
propagate the new philosophy. The accom- 
modating Mahatmas were untiring in their 
miracle exhibitions. Although two thousand 
miles distant, by mere effort of will they 
could " precipitate " an astral letter into a cab- 
inet or project an astral personality into the 
reception-room. Flowers dropped from no- 
where into the awe-struck circle, unseen bells 
jingled, and the usual phenomena of the 



148 ENEiMIES AND EVIDENCES 

spiritistic stance were now induced through 
the marvelous psychic powers of the Mahat- 
mas. Spiritism, appealing to the low and 
grossly ignorant masses, had fallen into dis- 
repute. Theosophy, with this attractive gar- 
niture of the supernatural, pressed its claims 
on a more cultured class, and under the dig- 
nified name of Esoteric Buddhism now affects 
an intent to enlighten the benighted West. 
What matter if Blavatsky, betrayed by the 
Coulombs, was proved to be an impostor ! 
What matter if the Mahatma letters were 
shown to be in the Madame's handwriting ! 
What matter if the officials of her society 
were convicted of cozenage, and their theos- 
ophy had degenerated into theosophistry ! 
There still remained the grand moral teach- 
ing with its unselfish thought to better social 
conditions, and the elite of all "deceived de- 
ceivers :y were still proud to acknowledge 
themselves Esoteric Buddhists. 

The esoteric or occult elements of Theos- 
ophy outbud from the Upanishads. Their 
germs are to be found in those " excursions 
into the higher and freer regions of thought," as 
Professor Whitney called them, which charac- 
terize these Brahmanical treatises. The sev- 
eral schools of Hindu philosophy recognized 



OF CHRISTIANITY. I49 

the existence of a subtle inner body corre- 
sponding with the astral body of modern 
Theosophy, according to which four elements 
constitute man : 

i. The material or physical body, visible 
and tangible ; no passive piece of mechanism, 
but a living creature with a consciousness of 
its own. 

2. The fluidic perisoul or astral body, the 
tenuous involucrum or vesture of the trans- 
migrating spirit, on which the characteristics 
of the physical body are impressed. 

3. The soul, Ego, or individual. 

4. The spirit or Divine Father and life of 
man's system. 

The physical and the astral body consti- 
tute the masculine principle ; the soul, the 
feminine principle ; the spirit is an emana- 
tion from God and therefore is God. The 
astral and mental bodies, as formed at re- 
birth, are purely the expression of the Ego. 
The physical body is the instrument on 
which the Ego plays. 

The astral body, more specifically, is an 
ethereal duplicate of the physical body, the 
ghost or materialized form of communicating 
intelligences. Although it is admittedly pos- 
sible in the intervals of spirit life, Sinnett 



iSo ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES 

declares that the Mahatmas disapprove of ac- 
tive intercourse with departed human beings, 
for such communications may retard and em- 
barrass the spiritual development of those 
who have once been in advance of us, as 
garden plants pulled up by curious children 
are checked in their growth. 

Turning now to the diagnostic features of 
Theosophy, we encounter a system the very 
opposite of that to which we have pinned our 
faith— a repellent, irreversible fatalism which 
knows no pardon for the sake of a vicarious 
Saviour, but demands that sin be atoned for 
by re-birth into hundreds of earth lives, many 
of them passed in heart-sick agony, some in 
one sex, some in the other ; for the Ego of 
Theosophy is sexless. Theosophists declare 
that this theory of incarnation is founded on 
the personal experience of so-called " Adepts," 
and hence has claims to our acceptance that 
Christianity, the religion of unquestioning 
faith, has not. But where is the proof of re- 
incarnation ? Among the millions who have 
transmigrated there certainly should some- 
where be one, call him Adept if you please, 
retaining a recollection of some prenatal ex- 
periences. The testimony of one such per- 
son would outweigh tons of published twad- 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 151 

die — one, with the refreshing assurance of the 
Philosopher of Agrigentum, who declared ; 
" I perfectly remember the time before I was 
Empedocles, that I was once a boy, then a 
girl, a plant, a glittering fish, a bird that cut 
the air." We have all been other people, 
but not one of us can recall a single happen- 
ing in any former life. And yet the theory 
tallies with a widespread fancy that some- 
times it would seem as if we were being re- 
introduced, after the lapse of dreamy years, 
to scenes and experiences and thoughts once 
familiar. Wrote Dante Rossetti : — 

" I have been here before, 

But when, or how, I cannot tell : 
I know the grass beyond the door, 

The sweet keen smell, 
The sighing sound, the lights around the shore. 
" You have been mine before — 

How long I may not know : 
But just when at that swallow's soar 

Your neck turned so, 
Some veil did fall— I knew it all of yore. 
"Then, now— perchance again ! 

O round mine eyes your tresses shake ! 
Shall we not lie as we have lain 

Thus for love's sake, 
And sleep and wake, yet never break the chain ? " 

Perhaps you may suspect these verses of 
Rosettis were suggested by Buddha's intro- 
duction to Yasodhara. Plato taught pre- 



152 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES 

natal existence, and treats the soul's intui- 
tion of the Beautiful as a reminiscence of it. 
In Wordsworth's Ode on the " Intimations of 
Immortality,'' beautiful expression is given to 
the preexistence theory : — 

u Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting : 
The soul that rises with us, our life's Star, 
Hath had elsewhere its setting, 
And cometh from afar : 
Not in entire forget fulness, 
And not in utter nakedness, 
But trailing clouds of glory do we come 
From God who is our home." 

Theosophists have even pointed to the 
Bible itself for proof of their fundamental 
doctrine. You will remember the question 
the disciples put to Christ: " Master, did this 
man sin or his parents, that he was born 
blind?" (John ix. 2.) The Jews at that time 
believed in the transmigration of souls. If 
congenital blindness was a punishment for 
sin, then that sin must have been committed 
in a previous state of existence. But Christ 
said, No. The man's affliction was not the 
penalty of personal or inherited transgres- 
sion. "Neither hath this man sinned nor his 
parents ; but that the works , of God should 
be made manifest in him." 

Theosophy offsets the Christian doctrine 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 153 

of atonement with its Hindu theory of 
metempsychosis — which must be de fide be- 
cause the Mahatmas so teach. It traces the 
history of human souls from inorganic em- 
bodiments to reincarnations of men in other 
men. The practical working of the plan may 
be illustrated as follows : A New York vaude- 
ville actress of unsavory reputation dies ; 
and her Ego with its unattractive Karma 
transmigrates into a boy consecrated to the 
Church, whose life-struggle with tuberculosis, 
poverty, and disappointments, makes consider- 
able impression on the total of wickedness 
amassed by the woman of the stage. The 
relentless Ego, with the imposed penalty thus 
partially discharged, next finds expression in 
the person of an Austrian gambler, who adds 
vastly more to the original account than the 
clergyman was able to cancel. Hence, when 
the wandering Ego accepts from a heartless 
destiny, as its fourth tenement, the body of 
an Italian microcephalic child born with 
various stigmata of degeneration, its short 
but painful physical life crushed out by the 
hideous freightage of inherited sin, substan- 
tially checks the accumulating moral deficit. 
And so the ever-varying surplus of unatoned- 
for offenses is passed along ad infinitum. 



iS4 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES 

Thus the Theosophist, while accepting the 
testimony of revelation that the world lies in 
wickedness and that this wickedness demands 
expiation, provides a system of retribution 
by running foil with the Vedanta. Pain and 
self-sacrifice indeed atone for sin, but by a 
method grotesquely complex and mon- 
strously unjust ; for no one knows whose sins 
his sufferings are making satisfaction for, nor 
the nature and extent of those sins. Such is 
the fantastic speculation that results when 
fools who " rush in where angels fear to 
tread," attempt to improve on the Divine 
scheme. 

Theosophy teaches the evolution of the soul 
by means of these repeated incarnations, and 
boldly calls into service the Darwinian 
theory to relight the long-extinguished 
corpse-candles of a heathen graveyard. 
Says Annie Besant, on whom has fallen the 
mantle of Blavatsky : — 

" One divine Life, given as a seed for the 
life of man ; that seed growing by reincarna- 
tion, the infolded powers of the Spirit be- 
coming the unfolded powers of the man 
made God — such is the secret of evolution. 
Those who in the early days of humanity 
gave to it revelation dealt with the early 



OF CHRISTIANITY. I55 

stages of the human soul, stimulating its 
growth; those who appealed to intuition 
recognized the growing soul which possessed 
a harvest of experience ; those who spoke of 
happiness and virtue as one — were grasping 
after the oneness of all things and the per- 
fect happiness that lies only in the develop- 
ment of all. Thus (that is, by reincarnation) 
the human soul develops out of ignorance 
into partial knowledge, out of partial knowl- 
edge into divine life. 

" Even conscience is evolved by reincarna- 
tion. Born into the world utterly ignorant 
and therefore without knowledge of good or 
evil, the soul at first could not recognize any 
difference between right and wrong. At that 
early period every experience was useful 
simply as experience, and everything en- 
countered in life had some new lesson to im- 
part to the infant soul. It was found that 
happiness followed some actions — those that 
were in harmony with the laws of nature — 
and that misery followed others — those that 
were in contravention with these laws. By 
these results the soul slowly learned to dis- 
tinguish between the actions that made for 
progress and those which made for retarda- 
tion. As the soul passed through incurna- 



156 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES 

tion after incarnation, it gathered a large 
store of these experiences of actions and 
their results. Certain classes of actions had 
led to happiness and growth, other classes to 
unhappiness and delay. The first classes, it 
decided, were those which it was desirable 
to repeat, while the latter should be entirely 
avoided. When the time had arrived for the 
return to earth, and the soul was employed 
in making for itself a new mind, it wove into 
this new mind the conclusions on desirable 
and undesirable actions to which it had come 
when reviewing its previous earth-life. Some 
of these were clear and definite : ' That 
course of action led to sorrow, this course to 
joy ; performing that deed I reaped misery, 
performing this I found content and peace. 
In the future I will avoid that, and I will do 
this/ 

" These conclusions form what we call con- 
science or moral instinct. Regarding the 
nature of conscience in this way, we arrive 
at an understanding of its limitations. When 
anything comes before the soul similar to its 
past experiences, the registered decision as- 
serts itself and the * voice of conscience ' is 
heard ; but when new circumstances arise 
and no registered decision is available, con- 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 



*57 



science is dumb." This is evolution out-at- 
elbows ! 

Theosophy is thus clearly a furbishing up 
of worthless wares to render them market- 
able ; a rehabilitation of Brahmanical philos- 
ophy, linked with an attempt to drive sense 
and science into its jumble of mystical non- 
sense, as is unmistakably shown by the 
Besant theory of the evolution of conscience ; 
a compound of Upanishad conceptions and 
the commonplaces of modern science, with 
the design of dazzling at any cost. It places 
a scientific construction on childish Hindu 
fables, which it claims possess a recondite 
meaning, its interpretations being of much 
the same nature as a contention that the 
History of Goody Two-Shoes is really a 
quaint treatise on the nebular hypothesis of 
La Place, or the polyhedric theory of Senor 
Soria. Theosophy affects peerless scholar- 
ship, but talks learned nonsense. Blavatsky's 
"Isis Unveiled " is chaos itself. It is voluble in 
its hints of amazing secrets to be revealed 
and promise-crammed of supernatural powers 
to be acquired by mysterious training; and 
these are the lures that deceive. Carlyle 
somewhere said that England contained 
thirty millions of people — mostly fools ! The 



15* 



ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES 



remark might well be extended to some 
other lands which are overstocked with suf- 
ferers from psycho-sensorial disturbances. 
Herein you have an explanation of the popu- 
larity of Theosophy. Surface-skimming 
Christians are easily entrapped by the 
tuzzimuzzy shreds of oriental wisdom. 

Theosophy has adopted from pagan re- 
ligions the conception of a female principle 
in Deity ; an idea rigidly excluded by pure 
Christianity, which regards the mother of 
Jesus only as blessed among women. Deity 
is without sex. 

Theosophy borrows its god from the 
Bhagavad Gita ; the Attributeless yet in- 
finitely Attributed, the Impotent Nothing of 
Hindu philosophy. Its supreme being is 
thus a powerless nonentity, a distant spiritual 
jelly-fish, a god without ethical vigor, with- 
out the personality accorded to atoms. In- 
deed, Theosophists are teaching that each 
true upward step in their evolution implies a 
getting rid, a subduing, a dissolving, of the 
personality. The god of Theosophy cannot 
feel for man. His knowledge of what takes 
place on earth is comparable to the knowledge 
a photographic film possesses of the scenes 
that are focussed upon it. He is deaf to the 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 159 

cry of the sin-convicted for pardon and up- 
lift. There is no God to the Theosophist 
save the god each man can himself become. 
He is now awaiting a twelfth and last Mes- 
siah, whose mission is to harmonize into one 
religion the discordant teachings of eleven 
predecessors — Adam, Enoch, Fohi, Brigu, 
Zoroaster, Thoth, Moses, Laotsze, Jesus, 
Muhammad, and Ghengis Khan ! Such is the 
pretended dream of this false system — a fus- 
ing of all the faiths of the world in the cruci- 
ble of Theosophy ; a reduction of the uni- 
verse to one substance, whether it be mind, 
or matter, or neither, from which principle 
all the phenomena of the physical and the 
spiritual world are deduced. And this is 
palpable monism. 

Christianity proclaims the eternal respon- 
sibility of the individual soul for every 
thought and word and action, and insists 
upon the necessity of repentance for the re- 
mission of sins. Theosophy teaches that 
there is no real punishment for sin except 
what is incident to earth-life, under the laws 
of cause and effect, or under the laws of re- 
incarnation in some lower human tenement. 
There is no exclusion from a future of hap- 
piness by reason of unrepented of, or un- 



160 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES 

atoned for, sin. The heaven of Theosophy, 
Nirvana, when attained is practical efiface- 
ment of the conscious Ego, intellectual syn- 
cope that knows no wakening ; a worthless 
salvation. Under such a system men are 
not deterred from sin, for, there being no in- 
tellectual activity in Nirvana, thought not 
only ceases, but ceases to be damnation (the 
hell of Christianity). 

The fact that death does not interrupt the 
course of consciousness ; the fact that we 
are to be immediately and forever conscious 
of all the thoughts we have entertained, the 
passions we have indulged, the ingratitude 
we have cherished, the regret for unim- 
proved opportunity, the remorse for thought- 
less or malicious action ; the fact that it is 
consciousness which will make eternity a 
heaven or a hell for us, is among the most 
awful of human apprehensions. Christianity 
is the religion of consciousness ; Theosophy 
is the hypothesis of swoon. The one " be- 
gins nowhere, leads nowhere, ends nowhere." 
The other begins with God, the Creator of 
all things visible and invisible ; leads on to 
Christ, the concrete crucified Redeemer; 
and ends in a heavenly life characterized by 
conscious possession of bodily and mental 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 161 

powers, by association with glorified loved 
ones, -by joyous activity in an affectionate 
and freely rendered service. The one deals 
with phantoms ; the other, with actualities. 
The Theosophist is indifferent to verities, 
and dabbles in the theoretical and the occult. 
The Christian adduces incontestable facts in 
evidence of his belief, and uncompromisingly 
thrusts aside theory in his loyalty to the Re- 
ligion of Reason. 

The intent of Theosophy is to dishonor 
Christ ; hence it pompously trumpets the 
welcome doctrine that men have no need of 
a Saviour, and has seized on the theory of 
reincarnation, through which every man may 
atone for his own sins, in order to rid the 
world of a necessity for Jesus. Its cardinal 
tenet is salvation through personal effort 
and merit, won by one's own Ego, slowly at- 
tained in many incarnations. 

Christianity, armed with incontrovertible 

proof of the death and the resurrection of 

Jesus of Nazareth, points ever to the Cross on 

which the Son of God and the Son of man 

gave his life for the sins of the whole human 

race — for the brothers who lived in the elder 

time, reaching out their helpless hands to 

Heaven; for the thousands of millions who 
11 



i62 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES 

have been hidden from the Sun of Right- 
eousness in the depths of ignorance and fa- 
naticism ; for the thousands of millions who 
have caught the energy of the divine sun- 
rays and lifted the nations from the plane 
earthly to the plane angelic. Through the 
blood of Christ and the electing grace of 
God, man is saved. Christianity proclaims 
Jesus Christ the all-sufficient sacrifice for 
sin. once offered, on Calvary — once and for 
all time. In this concrete, approachable, 
comprehensible Saviour, human reason finds 
its God incarnate, and owns its rightful alle- 
giance. 

Theosophy represents an organized as- 
sault on the Son of God. Through the lips 
of Col. Olcott it has announced its inten- 
tion " to tear Christianity to tatters." Bla- 
vatsky, perhaps in a spirit of paronomasia, 
named the monthly ororan of her sect " Luci- 
fer." And yet, through its pretended mis- 
sion to spread pure and noble thoughts, The- 
osophy tempts so insidiously as to disarm 
suspicion. The gospel it presents for our 
acceptance bristles with moral aphorisms, 
and exhorts to a virtuous, unselfish, philan- 
thropic life. But its beauty is as the beauty 
of flowers that win their pallid tints and 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 163 

nauseous odors from the festering bodies of 
dank cemetery corners. It begins with a 
complimentary patronage of Jesus, making 
him a great Mahatma who rose through suc- 
cessive incarnations to a control of natural 
laws and forces. It ends by ushering him 
off the stage into an inconspicuous seat 
at the rear of its theater. Thousands of 
ardent seekers after truth have been at- 
tracted by its pinchbeck excellences. Thou- 
sands who have embraced Theosophy would, 
at the outset, have recoiled with horror had 
they been able to penetrate the meretricious 
brilliancy of the photosphere and view the 
black, forbidding crust behind. 

We cannot contemplate without a sigh 
men and women burying their talents in this 
whited sepulcher of delusion, wasting their 
lives in a fruitless search for the gold of truth 
— their duty forgotten, their labor misap- 
plied, their learning sacrificed, their genius 
abused, their God defied. Christianity, like 
a benignant Sun, is shining on these mis- 
guided ones ; but their moral polyopia multi- 
plies the image of the luminary, or intellec- 
tual amaurosis hides its life-giving radiations 
from their souls. We cannot but feel that 
they are included amongthe number of those 



1 64 EVIDENCES OF CHRISTIANITY. 

we are warned against in these clear and 
specific words of him whose second com- 
ing we await in faith, the Alpha and Omega 
of all Messiahs : 

" There shall arise false Christs, and false 
prophets, and shall show great signs and 
wonders ; insomuch that, if it were possible, 
they shall deceive the very elect. Behold, I 
have told you before. Wherefore if they 
shall say unto you, Behold, he is in the des- 
ert ; go not forth : Behold, he is in the secret 
chambers ; believe it not. For as the light- 
ning cometh out of the east and shineth even 
unto the west ; so shall also the coming of 
the Son of man be." (Matt. xxiv. 24-27.) 



What is Christianity More than Spiritism, which Seeks 
to Prove Survival of Death Through Communica- 
tion with Disembodied Spirits ? With an Exposi- 
tion on the True Psychologic Proof of Immortality. 

(Now the Spirit speaketh expressly, that in the latter times some shall 
depart from the faith, giving heed to seducing spirits, and doctrines 
of devils [literally, doctrines concerning demons, or spiritual 
intelligences]. I Tim. iv. i.) 

About thirty years ago, Robert Dale Owen 
wrote to the skeptical President Felton, of 
Harvard College: 

"Time, the great teacher, will decide 
between us. Ten years — probably less — will 
see the question determined whether the spir- 
itual hypothesis is destined to grow in favor 
and assume station as a reality, or to sink into 
discredit as a mere figment of the brain." 

The Spiritual Hypothesis has grown in 
popular favor. It has not "blown over" as 
was predicted. It shows no signs of wane. 
Spiritism, which has been rampant in the 
world for forty centuries, numbers to-day five 
hundred millions of adherents among the 
pagan nations, the devil-worshipers of the 
Eastern hemisphere, who believe they are in 
communication with unseen powers ; and out 
of the eighty-five millions of human beings 
who constitute the population of the United 



166 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES 

States, no fewer than fifteen millions are 
tinctured with spiritistic beliefs. Thus this 
faith which leads the swarm of lying wonders 
has assumed proportions that warrant a thor- 
ough investigation of its doctrines. 

Among the remarkable claims advanced by 
its advocates is that of novelty; it is heralded 
as new; as "the harbinger of a Modern Dis- 
pensation which is to revolutionize the faith 
and practices of mankind/' But there is 
nothing new about Spiritism. It has cursed 
the earth since the days of the Nephilim. 
The older world abounds with its desolate 
shrines and corroded idols. History repeats, 
age after age, the story of belief in mysterious 
invisible malevolent powers, whom men feared, 
consulted, and sought to conciliate. Those 
who accept the Bible as the inspired word of 
God are constrained to believe that there 
exist in the universe intelligences other than 
human selfs. 

We learn from passages in Scripture that 
when the eyes of men have been divinely 
opened they have beheld angelic beings in 
the surrounding air, and as individual exist- 
ences, taking part in human affairs. Thus, in 
Job, Satan, in answer to a question of the 
Lords, says that he is come "from going to 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 167 

and fro in the earth, and from walking up and 
down in it"; and he is afterward made a 
direct instrument of the Almighty in his deal- 
ings with man. So, in the 2 2d chapter of 
1 Kings, the prophet Micaiah thus explains 
the infatuation of King Ahab: "Hear thou 
therefore the word of the Lord : I saw the 
Lord sitting on his throne, and all the host of 
heaven standing by him on his right hand and 
on his left. And the Lord said, Who shall 
entice Ahab that he may go up and fall at 
Ramoth-gilead? And one said on this man- 
ner, and another said on that manner. And 
there came forth a spirit, and stood before the 
Lord, and said, I will entice him. And the 
Lord said unto him, Wherewith ? And he 
said, I will go forth, and I will be a lying 
spirit in the mouth of all his prophets. And 
HE said, Thou shalt entice him, and prevail : 
go forth, and do so." 

Elsewhere in Holy Writ particular angels 
are represented as being sent on divine 
errands, and while thus commissioned as hold- 
ing intercourse with men. God has given us 
a past pregnant with such examples for our 
instruction and security. While history was 
making, and humanity was inexperienced, he 
directed men in visions; he taught them by 



168 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES 

miracles ; he corrected their disobedience by 
punishments severe and startling; he removed 
promptly by death the adulterer, the child- 
stealer, the perjurer, the necromancer, or con- 
suiter with the dead. But with the coming of 
the Son of Man a new day dawned, a day of 
peace on earth, good will toward men. We 
are left now to study the past that we may 
deal with the exigencies of the present and 
forecast the contingencies of the future. More- 
over, the tares and the wheat, in Gods prov- 
idence, are permitted to grow together till the 
harvest. 

Modern Spiritism is based on the theory of 
consultation with the dead and of the possibil- 
ity of supernatural manifestations by the 
departed through the agency of specially 
qualified persons called mediums. Such com- 
munications are believed to prove the survival 
of bodily death by the human personality, 
The phenomena of the siance — including the 
suspension of various physical laws ; automatic 
phenomena like table-tilting; spirit writing, 
drawing, and photographing; luminous appear- 
ances, spirit music, quasi-human voices, trance- 
speaking for the communication of messages; 
impersonation, other personalities taking pos- 
session of the medium ; and materialization 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 169 

of flowers, etc., the crowning wonder of Spirit- 
ism — have been explained as follows : 

(1) They are purely imaginary. 

(2) They are accounted for on certain sci- 
entific principles which are not yet perfectly 
understood. 

Are the phenomena entirely imaginary ? 

When scientific men, deliberately met for 
the purpose of investigating inexplicable phe- 
nomena, decide that such phenomena are not 
due to trickery but exhibit an unfamiliar force 
acting in the physical world otherwise than 
through the brain or muscles of a possessed 
medium, we cannot but believe that, divesting 
Spiritism of all the humbug, and making due 
allowance for imposture, self-delusion, and 
hallucination, much will be left that seeks 
explanation in some better theory than that 
of imagination. We certainly have incontes- 
table evidence of the genuineness of the 
phenomena. 

Less than a quarter-century ago any person 
who seriously devoted himself to the investi- 
gation of spiritual phenomena was regarded 
as a psychasthenic. A suggestionist was 
outside the pale of professional respect. 
Hypnotism was moonstruck madness. Every 
so-called spiritualist was insane. To-day the 



170 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES 

world's deepest thinkers are accepting the 
truths and construing the facts of abnormal 
psychology. Learned societies are chron- 
icling the events of the sdance, and men of 
broad culture and unquestioned sincerity are 
seeking to prove thereby the immortality of 
the soul and the possibility of bodily resurrec- 
tion, and, what is more, they are doing it with- 
out incurring any liability to the charge of 
superstition, "a belief in the supernatural 
without sufficient evidence." 

Leaders of science are becoming conscious 
of a superphysical world, which men have 
sought to apprehend since men began to 
think. Psychology, which in its practical 
phase contemplates the development of 
spiritual faculty, is recognized as a study par- 
amount. The depth and power and death- 
lessness of the human personality — all objects 
of non-sensuous intuition (noumena) — have 
come to be clearly apprehended ; materialism 
is scouted, and sanguine observers, sensing 
the dawn of a new epoch, see implied in the 
promise of things a proximate application of 
Emerson's philosophy — "When the Master of 
the universe has points to carry in his gov- 
ernment, he impresses his will in the structure 
of minds" — let us interpret it, in the evolu- 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 171 

tion of the spiritual consciousness of man, the 
logical method of improving environment and 
unmaking heredity. 

Careful observers have proved that ideas 
actively present in one mind can be trans- 
mitted to another by what is called telepathy, 
the modus operandi of which is entirely un- 
known, though a transmitting agent must be 
implied ; that is to say, a brain from which is 
liberated — whether voluntarily or subcon- 
sciously — something supremely active, some- 
thing of the nature of physiopsychic vibration, 
which expanding concentrically in all direc- 
tions, reaches the brain of the percipient, 
bringing with it the agent's thought. Con- 
temporary psychology tends to the doctrine 
that " different consciousnesses or different 
aggregates of states of consciousness may 
combine and interpenetrate somewhat anal- 
ogously to what theologians mean by the 
communion of souls." The fact that the 
" control " is altogether different from the 
waking self of the medium, and often displays 
unaccountable acquaintance with the life his- 
tories of persons the medium never met and 
knows nothing of, is frankly stated in his 
Psychology by Professor James of Harvard 
University. Thus the objective consciousness 



172 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES 

is not the whole personality of the man, but 
only a fraction of the spiritual part, the real 
organic life of the human being, the created 
copy of God. There is a consciousness of 
which we are objectively unaware. 

Professor Myers has shown that in " lapses 
from waking consciousness we gain glimpses 
of faculties as yet unexercised and unbreathed, 
the mere existence of which is proof that man 
is called to nobler destinies and equipped for 
a larger stage than this material life can fur- 
nish." It is upon these hidden faculties that 
the ingenuous medium or psychic uncon- 
sciously draws, and their spontaneous exploi- 
tation explains all the phenomena of the 
stance except such as are accounted for by 
fraud, self-deception, and hallucination. The 
medium himself is "the intelligent fourth 
dimensional being" to whom certain men of 
science have referred these phenomena ; and 
the psychic force employed is inherent in all 
human beings, but developed and subcon- 
sciously utilized only in a few. We need not 
have recourse to the supernatural to explain 
what is merely supernormal. 

There is no evidence to prove that the 
spirits of the dead are concerned in stance 
phenomena, which have been witnessed and 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 173 

verified by many careful, honest, and intelli- 
gent observers. The idea of such spirit inter- 
course is repugnant to reason. Aside from 
the fact that, if the communications be 
accepted as messages from the souls of the 
righteous departed, such a belief cannot be 
reconciled with an exalted conception of the 
state of disembodied spirits — a state of wan- 
dering about the earth and being conversant 
with human affairs — we are confronted with the 
equally significant fact that the intellectual 
status of all circles is foisonless and low. No 
important truths are communicated; the reve- 
lations made by our alleged deceased relatives 
are distasteful to us, and, what is most conclu- 
sive, utterly at variance with their gifts and 
characters. Spiritism mocks us by picturing 
appalling mental degeneration as the conse- 
quence of death. Not a page of mediumistic 
literature has the smallest value. More 
unmitigated rubbish was never issued from 
the printery. 

In its position that nothing can be holier 
than the communion between a human being 
and the spirit of a loved one gone before, 
Spiritism discards a Divine Comforter, com- 
municating spirits perform the offices of the 
Holy Ghost. Thus affection for ones dead 



i 7 4 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES 

kinsfolk takes precedence of God-love, and 
faith expires. The attitude of sympathy and 
condonation here assumed by certain Chris- 
tian clergymen, who are proclaiming that 
those whom we have loved and lost are free 
to come back to us in spirit form to console 
and to direct, manifestly implies attempted 
subtraction from the honor, the glory, and the 
sacred function of the Holy Spirit of God. 
It is the blasphemous voice of Theosophy 
sounding from the Christian pulpit. For 
" liberated souls," declares Annie Besant in 
her Theosophical Revieiu, " remain among us 
as Revealers, as helping divine Teachers, 
bearing the burden of the flesh ; quickening 
by their spoken words our nascent intuition, 
and by their revelation of truth aiding us to 
climb more swiftly toward the light." 

The theory that both God, the Infallible 
Guide, and well-meaning but fallible disem- 
bodied souls are together inspiring and direct- 
ing human beings, often necessarily at cross 
purposes, would involve an inevitable clashing 
of influences that must long ago have thrown 
the world into chaos. The theory of Mas- 
sey's, that the Holy Ghost speaks to an 
afflicted mother through the spirit of a de- 
parted child, while not consonant with reason, 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 175 

is nicely calculated to destroy our belief in 
the immediate accessibility and nearness of 
Deity. The Bible presents no instance in 
which any spirit but the Spirit of God has 
ever influenced men for good. 

You may well ask, if communication with 
the dead were lawful, and fraught with satis- 
faction, would God have concealed from men 
so innocent a means of gratifying the most 
intense longings of human nature ? The 
answer of the centuries is " No." What one 
of us has not laid away in the grave at least 
one whom we would give worlds to commu- 
nicate with, one whom we would gladly have 
sacrificed our life to save ? And O, if we 
could open communication with the departed, 
if we could feel that they were ever near us, 
how greatly would the burden of our sorrow 
be lessened ! But does it not seem presump- 
tuous sin in you and in me — when God, for 
purposes that we cannot fathom and dare not 
question, has decreed a temporary separation 
— to defy the divine fiat and spend our time, 
our substance, nay, prostitute our intellects, 
in a wicked and unprofitable search for a 
means of defeating it ? I can but regard 
such a course as the rankest rebellion against 
the Almighty, and I can only interpret it as 



176 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES 

evincing a deplorable deficiency in that faith 
which alone can save. Resort to Spiritism is 
a pathognomonic symptom of shattered trust. 
It is smirching many Christian lives with the 
slime of the serpent. I cannot but recall the 
touching lines of Wordsworth in " The Afflic- 
tion of Margaret," the widow of Penrith : 

" I look for ghosts ; but none will force 
Their way to me. 'Tis falsely said 

That there was ever intercourse 
Between the living and the dead. 

For surely, then, I should have sight 

Of him I wait for day and night 

With love and longings infinite." 

The inspired monarch of Israel, whom God 
delighted to indulge, decided this question for 
you and for me when over the body of Bath- 
sheba's firstborn he cried out in the anguish 
of his heart, " I shall go to him, but he shall 
not return to me." 

It is as truly said to-day as in the Egyptian 
"Minstrel's Song" which thrilled the land of 
lotus bloom four thousand years ago, " As- 
suredly none that hath died hath ever yet 
returned." And we are left to wonder with 
Umar Khaiyam : 

" Strange, is it not ? that of the myriads who 
Before us pass'd the door of darkness through, 
Not one returns to tell us of the road 
Which to discover we must travel too ! " 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 177 

The proof of immortality is not to be 
sought for in the vaporings of Spiritism. 

A psychologic evidence of existence after 
death has been found in the fact that immor- 
tality is an apprehension of human reason. 
There is hardly a page in the history of 
serious literature — from the venerable bible 
of the Egyptians to modern expressions of 
human thought and hope — which does not 
bear witness to the vehement desire of men 
to catch some glimpse of the great Afterward. 
They would fain believe the Unseen World 
not altogether bournless and unfathomable — 
the lifeless, loveless dwelling place of the 
dead — and welcomed any teaching that pro- 
fessed to solve the mystery. Age after age, 
the reason of man has impressed a conviction 
of the deathlessness of the soul 

Is it probable that such general belief in 

existence after death, and such widespread 

horror of annihilation, is well founded ? 

Have we any tangible proof that the soul is 

imperishable and destined to a conscious life 

beyond the grave? Is incarnate humanity 

capable of anything that assures of post-mortal 

existence? Has psychology any argument to 

offer? Evidence of persisting personality has 

been believed to lie in the theory of unfin- 
12 



178 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES 

ished lives — in the infinite perfectibility of the 
mind, which is cut short in its development 
even in the longest of human lives. Some 
thinkers have deduced immortality from the 
laws of the indestructibility of matter and the 
conservation of force. No particle of matter 
has ever been destroyed, no energy is ever 
dissipated. Carrying this natural law into the 
world spiritual, we may infer the imperishable 
nature of the soul, for all life is governed 
by consistent law. Science teaches the con- 
tinuity of existence. 

Many see in the inexpressible yearning 
after immortality the strongest psychological 
reason for its reality. The indwelling desire 
implies assurance of its gratification. It is 
impossible to think of one's self as ceasing to 
live. This was Cicero's proof — " because the 
souls of the best and wisest have such antici- 
pations of a future state that they center their 
thoughts only on eternity." Why should the 
thoughts of men, from the very beginnings of 
history, have been busied in such a quest? 
Would God have implanted a longing so 
universally in man if he had no intention of 
gratifying it? No emotion, no passion, no 
craving, no desire that is not intended by 
divine love to be indulged sometime, some- 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 179 

where, somehow. Are we to believe that here 
is an exception? Is it not contrary to the 
divine plan to endow any being with capabil- 
ities never to be developed ? Surely, God is 
not taunting man with a lie. 

But with all this, Classical Science is un- 
satisfied, and rigorously demands more con- 
vincing proof than such as is rooted in 
personal feeling. It does not accept Emer- 
son's opinion that "the implanting of a desire 
indicates that the gratification of that desire 
is in the constitution of the creature that feels 
it. The wish for food, the wish for motion, 
the wish for sleep, for society, for knowledge, 
are not random whims, but ground in the 
structure of the creature, and must be satis- 
fied by food, by motion, by sleep, by society, 
by knowledge." Science declines to refer the 
same argument to the immortality of the soul. 
The materialist contends that emotion, voli- 
tion, thought, consciousness itseif,are functions 
of the brain, and must therefore come to an 
end when the brain ceases to function. Per- 
ish the brain, perish intellect, susceptibility, 
will — perish the man. Haeckel declares the 
very soul to be a mere function of the brain, 
and to be lost with the decomposition of that 
oman. The end of the earth life is therefore 



180 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES 

absolute finality. Our hearts sink within us 
as we listen to the array of syllogisms 
whereby our hopes of a future life are made 
to appear like foolish dreams. But the cor- 
relation of mind and brain by no means 
proves their identity; and if we can establish 
the fact that mental operations go on without 
brain or sense cooperation and at a distance 
from the body, we shall have proved the 
existence of an immaterial principle, a spiritual 
substance, in man. This, psychological sci- 
ence incontrovertibly demonstrates to-day. It 
is no longer true that "serious souls are bet- 
ter believers in immortality than they can 
give grounds for." Psychology and Scripture 
agree in affirming man to be of twofold 
nature — immaterial as spirit or soul and 
material as body. On one side of his being 
he is animal and mortal; on the other, by 
reasoa of his essence as a free, self-conscious, 
spiritual personality, he takes class with all 
incorporeal intelligences. Psychology has 
proved a double consciousness. Every hu- 
man being is now conceived of by students 
of mind as existing simultaneously in two 
worlds, described as the objective, supralimi- 
nal, or world of waking life, in which he 
communicates through his senses with the 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 181 

phenomenal universe, and the subjective or 
transliminal, the world of sleep, of an all-com- 
prehensive outside existence, of which the 
earthlife is but a fractional expression or seg- 
mentary manifestation. The objectively con- 
scious man is thus continuous with a higher 
spiritual self, which in its turn is continuous 
with God (Rom. vii; Gal. v). And the ideal 
evolution of character consists in bringing the 
frail objective or earth life wholly under the 
happy influence of a higher, better self, inter- 
penetrated by the Spirit of God and inclosing 
supreme happiness within itself. 

The higher self, Inner Man, or Ego, is 
gifted with spiritual perception, with super- 
normal powers of apprehension and insight, 
with absolute command over expression 
through a bodily organism that is practically 
boundless within the limitations of physical 
possibility and moral right, with susceptibility 
to impression by other human personalities 
and kindred spiritual intelligences, with tele- 
pathic powers to impress these in turn, and 
with a measure of prescience that on occasion 
forecasts what is to be. Immortality is a per- 
ception of this spirit or Jiigher self, which is 
not produced by the brain, but acts independ- 
ently of the brain, using that brain as the 



182 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES 

essential organ of transmission for its knowl- 
edge, general resources, and supersensible 
powers. It is the purpose of hypnotic sug- 
gestion to induce such transmission, and so 
establish a subpersonal control over organs of 
body and faculties of mind. Not only may 
irregularities in the fulfillment of physical 
functions be remedied by assumption of the 
natural psycho-physical control, and so 
diseases that are not organic cured, but all 
attitudes of the objective mind — its trends of 
thought, opinions, beliefs, desires, propensities, 
tendencies, emotions, and passions — are con- 
trollable and alterable by this higher human 
personality along lines that are moral and true. 
Immediate insight into principle, quickness 
and ease of comprehension, general facility 
and naturalness in application, reproductive 
memory, creative imagination, faculty, talent, 
genius, are all transferable from the trans- 
liminal nature through the brain, whose func- 
tion is merely transmissive. All these things 
are now everyday occurrences (vide the Em- 
manuel Movement in our Churches); and it 
is continually made evident in psychic experi- 
ments that physical wholeness in given areas 
and centers of the brain is the condition of 
perfect transmission by means of these areas 






OF CHRISTIANITY. 183 

and centers. Transfers cannot be made, or 
made to advantage, through the medium of 
poisoned, ill-fed, or worn-out cells. We can- 
not go beyond the limit which the brain lays 
upon intellectuality. Mind can manifest itself 
normally through healthy nervous matter 
only. The first obligation of the suggestion- 
ist, therefore, is to study the brain he is about 
to use as his transmitting agent, and, where 
necessary, strengthen and replenish it before 
inspiring the transliminal self to attempt, 
through a defective organ, difficult or impos- 
sible expression. Let the brain be sound, and 
the immediate output of intellectual and 
moral power in response to suggestion is little 
short of the miraculous. 

Here again it is clear that the brain does 
not create spiritual energy. Further, the 
argument that the brain transmits and does 
not produce is illuminated by the fact that the 
suggestionist gives a successful impulsion 
when the brain is asleep, the subject knowing 
nothing about it objectively; and the dynamic 
appeal that is made materializes in post-hyp- 
notic action when the brain resumes its nor- 
mal transmissive function again. When I put 
a patient to sleep in order to break an evil 
habit by suggestion, or inspire expression of 



1 84 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES 

potential talent, do I suggest to a dead brain? 
No. I talk to something that uses the torpid 
unfeeling brain when it comes to life again — 
something that conditions the very function- 
ing of that brain — something that I can direct 
to wake that brain at my pleasure and make 
that brain serve its purposes — call it what you 
will, Soul, Ego, Subliminal Self — but that 
something is the undying Spirit of the man 
that identifies him with the eternal. When 
the brain stops acting, the individual con- 
sciousness which it transmitted " will vanish 
entirely from this world, but the sphere of 
being that supplied the consciousness," to 
quote Professor James in "Human Immortal- 
ity," " remains intact in that more real world 
with which, even while here, it was (as we 
have shown) continuous." The human per- 
sonality depends on the brain for its earth 
life, but not for its cosmic or eternal life. 
"The death of the body," said Kant, "is the 
end of the sensational use of the mind, but 
only the beginning of the intellectual use. 
So the body is not the cause of our thinking, 
but merely a condition restrictive thereof; it 
is really an impeder of our pure spiritual life." 
It stands in the way of an actualization of the 
full powers of the Ego. 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 185 

I have said that immortality is a perception 
of the superior spiritual Self, and this to me 
is a full psychologic proof of immortality. 
But to those who have never entered into 
that close relationship with the transliminal 
mind that rapport implies — who have never 
felt the touch of a soul — with many of whom 
spiritual discernment is likely to be in an em- 
bryonic state, this subjective attestation may 
seem vitally insufficient. More satisfying 
evidence is demanded of continuing personal- 
ity, after the death change, and such is 
forthcoming although it is not based on well- 
attested instances of communication with the 
dead. At the present stage of investigation 
there exists no convincing evidence of tele- 
pathic intercourse with the departed. 

By telepathy is meant the direct communi- 
cation of one mind with another, otherwise 
than through the normal operation of the 
recognized sense organs — that is, without the 
use of words, sounds, odors, looks, gestures, 
or other material signs. 

In the law of telepathy, developing into the 
law of spiritual intercommunication between 
incarnate and discarnate spirits, Professor 
Myers discerned dimly adumbrated before his 
eyes the highest law with which human sci- 



1 86 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES 

ence can conceivably have to deal. The dis- 
covery of telepathy opens before us a potential 
communication between all life. And if, as 
our present evidence indicates, this telepathic 
intercourse can subsist between embodied and 
disembodied souls, that law must needs lie at 
the very center of cosmic evolution. It will 
be evolutionary, as depending on a faculty 
now in actual course of development. It will 
be cosmic; for it may — it almost must — by 
analogy subsist not on this planet only, but 
wherever in the universe discarnate and incar- 
nate spirits may be intermingled or juxtaposed. 

This is a beautiful theory and is undoubt- 
edly true ; but to induce from it an assurance 
of immortality would be icarian in the 
extreme, despite the position taken by Profes- 
sor Hyslop and Sir Oliver Lodge. 

The author of this volume has never heard 
a spiritistic medium say anything that was 
not readily comprehensible on the theory of 
thought-transference. He has never seen a 
medium do anything that could not be ration- 
ally explained as due to the action of super- 
sensible psychic force which he believes to 
inhere in every human personality, but which 
only a few human beings have power con- 
sciously or 'unconsciously to exploit in their 



) 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 187 



earth lives, or make visible and tangible 
in the so-called phenomena of the seance. 

Brutes are capable of telepathic communi- 
cation with one another. It cannot, then, 
seem marvelous that a professional trance 
medium in perfect training should be able to 
project her transliminal self indiscriminately, 
or, with method in her ecstasy, force her way 
subjectively into the penetralia of selected 
human minds, and so possess herself of infor- 
mation calculated to confuse, deceive, or other- 
wise impress her investigators. 

As heretofore stated, the proof of immor- 
tality is found outside the delusions, tricks, 
and veritable psychic phenomena of Spiritism. 
The gold of its fact is concentrated in a pay- 
streak of supersensible realities which render 
it not only possible but certain. 

Science is forced to admit the existence of 
a superphysical world, and recognizes the 
existence in man of a more comprehensive 
consciousness than the supraliminal self, 
whose spiritual powers are exercised in spite 
of, rather than by aid of, the material organ- 
ism ; and that so soon as man is conceived as 
constantly dwelling in this wider range of 
powers his survival of death becomes an 
inevitable corollary. 



188 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES 

These powers are of the nature of clairvoy- 
ance, clairaudience, prescience, automatic 
writing, psychometry, mind-reading, mental 
healing, and allied phenomena — the suspen - 
sion of physical laws like the spontaneous 
movement of ponderable bodies — variform 
abnormal physical phenomena, in which "pur- 
posive human-like intelligence " manifests 
itself as a direct cause. Self-projection along 
these supernormal lines is facilitated by the 
induction of hypnosis. The more deathlike 
the state of the body, the more lucid the per- 
ceptions of the spirit. When the mind is 
thus measurably divested of all physical tram- 
mels, the inherent faculty of the spirit utters 
itself more freely. Time and space have 
practically no existence; matter is transpar- 
ent; the experiences of everyday life are 
transcended ; supranormal visual perception 
obtains. 

If prevision, retrocognition, clairvoyance 
and other transcendent faculties can be 
proved to inhere in the soul, the soul's inde- 
pendence of the body is made manifest. 

" If," to quote Podmore (" Modern Spir- 
itualism "), " in states of trance or ecstasy the 
soul has knowledge of things distant and 
things hidden, can foretell the future and read 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 189 

the past as an open book, it seems a lawful 
inference that, as such faculties have not been 
acquired in the process of terrestrial evolution 
and find but little employment or justification 
here, they must testify to a world of higher 
uses and an evolution not conditioned by 
our material environment." And they most 
certainly do. 

Clairvoyance (trance lucidity) is but the 
translation of spiritual perception into the 
earth life. It is independent of the senses. 
It rs a kind of extra-corporeal activity which 
certain persons under favorable circumstances 
have the power to make objective. Peculiarly 
sensitive organizations seem to be gifted with 
the needful something requisite to mental 
communication with persons at a distance (te- 
lepathy), with events happening in remote 
places (telepathic clairvoyance), even with 
things that are about to be (prescience). 

Psychological records contain a number of 
well-authenticated illustrations of clairvoyance 
The writers own experience along this line is 
limited to a single subject — an ignorant, un- 
sophisticated German maidservant who, on 
four occasions, while in a state of hypnosis in- 
duced by a friend, described accurately the 
contents of rooms which neither she nor the 



igo ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES 

operator had ever entered, and at one seance 
told in minute detail the doings of each mem- 
ber of a family living three miles from the 
scene of the experiment. In each instance 
the girls body reclined in a chair, absolutely 
dead to all sensuous impressions. The author 
is familiar with three other similar cases, in 
which the indiscernible immateriality that ani- 
mates the organism disengaged itself from that 
organism to see and hear from ten to three 
thousand miles away, and what it saw and 
heard at a designated time stood the test of 
verification. 

Akin to clairvoyance is X-ray vision, the 
power to see through opaque bodies, which has 
been induced by hypnotic suggestion. Tran- 
scendental perceptive power of this nature, 
self-projective in the earth life, has been called 
the sixth sense. 

The annals of Psychical Research Societies 
contain not a few accredited instances of its 
application to the finding of missing articles 
and persons. Ultranormal faculty is every- 
where recognized as inherent in the human 
personality. 

Now, if certain delicately constructed human 
beings have seen what is going on at a speci- 
fied time and place, even on the other side of 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 191 

the Atlantic, and what they have reported has 
been proved to be true, as is the case, then 
one of two hypotheses is established. Either 
the objective soul {psyche) is absent from the 
body at the time of the act of seeing, etc., or 
the higher spiritual self, endowed with cosmic 
knowledge and having access to all happenings 
in time and space, informs the objective self, 
which answers through the lips. In either 
case there must be an intangible, immateriate 
part to the man, above the body and outside 
of it, operating independently of its organs. 
This supersensible element, the permanent 
element in man, does not die with the body. 
At the moment of the death of its body it has 
been known to appear in recognizable but 
purely subjective shape to friends at a dis- 
tance, or to inform such friends of its gradua- 
tion from life by telepathic impression. To 
quote Maeterlinck: "No sincere mind now 
dreams of denying the possibility of these facts 
supported by documentary and other evidence 
as conclusive as that which serves as a basis 
for our firmest scientific convictions. If the 
apparition of a person whom I love, clearly 
recognizable and apparently so much living 
that I speak to it, enters my room to-night at 
the very minute when life is quitting the body 



i 9 2 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES 

that lies a thousand miles away from the spot 
where I am, that is, no doubt, very strange, 
even as everything is strange in a world of 
which we do not understand the first word ; 
but it shows at most that the soul, the spirit, 
the breath, the nervous and indiscernible force 
of the subtlest part of our matter, can disen- 
gage itself from that matter and survive it 
for an instant, even as the flame of a lamp 
which we extinguish sometimes becomes de- 
tached from the wick and hovers for a moment 
in the darkness." 

Psychical science thus proves inductively 
that spiritual existence is independent of a 
bodily organism, that personality can and does 
survive the shock of death, and that conscious- 
ness of personal identity perdures, but tells us 
nothing of its duration after dissociation from 
the body, or of its occupations in post-plane- 
tary life which is hidden from our view by 
physical limitations — life in the mighty cycles 
of eternity. This higher everlastingness which 
Christians mean by immortality is to be under- 
stood and won only through the process of 
the Cross. 

The Christian religion, which has stood the 
test of centuries, which has passed through the 
ordeal of fire and sword and triumphed over 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 193 

ignorance and prejudice and infidel assault, 
inculcates a belief in one God, the Maker of 
heaven and earth, and of all things visible 
and invisible — a belief in one Saviour, Jesus 
Christ, begotten of this God before all worlds, 
who for our salvation came down from 
Heaven, and as the Infinite Power above all 
law took upon him man's nature in the womb 
of the Virgin, assuming a human body with a 
human soul; who suffered death and de- 
scended into the place of departed spirits that 
he might undergo the condition of such as 
die and so satisfy the claims of death ; who 
has risen and sits at the right hand of the 
Father as our Advocate and Judge — a belief 
in the Holy Ghost, the same God though not 
the same person as the Father and the Son, 
whose function is to regenerate mankind. 
Thus in the unity of the Godhead there are 
three persons, of one substance, power and 
eternity. 

Christianity further teaches the existence 
of one universal Church, the flock of the 
Good Shepherd ; composed of the visible 
Church of Christ, a congregation of faith- 
ful men in which the pure word of God is 
preached and the sacraments of Baptism and 

the Lords Supper are duly administered ; and 

13 



194 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES 

the invisible Church, consisting of those who 
have gone to their reward, the accepted of 
God gathered out of all nations, with the holy 
angels. At the head of this Church is Christ; 
and the terms of admission, baptism with wa- 
ter, in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy 
Ghost, coupled with repentance and faith. 
O ! what a privilege to belong to this Church 
of Christ, militant and triumphant ; to serve 
as a constituent part of such a glorious organic 
whole! 

And finally our religion assures those who 
profess it with its beautiful belief in the com- 
munion of saints — that all the members of the 
Church visible are mystically united in Christ 
with one another and with the members of the 
Church invisible, having spiritual fellowship in 
common, and in addition thereto fellowship or 
communion with the Father, Son, and Holy 
Spirit in faith and love and prayer. Thus 
Christianity makes the living and the dead 
one blessed society, loving and worshiping the 
same Lord ; we remembering them and they 
remembering us ; we living in the blessed 
hope, nay, certainty, of meeting and recogniz- 
ing them in the life of the world to come, in 
the same glorious resurrection when this cor- 
ruptible shall have put on incorruption and 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 195 

this natural body shall rise a spiritual body 
and be endowed with spiritual powers through 
eternity. 

And there is but a single road that leads to 
those who lie in the churchyard. That road 
was laid out by the Almighty millennia ago, 
and it passes through the valley of the shadow 
of death. You and I must traverse it, because 
it is the ordained way. We know not when 
the call shall sound for us to set forth upon 
this thoroughfare of the ages. Let us await 
God's time and accept his place of meeting in 
patience and in faith. Let us not be angry at 
the dispensations of his providence which may 
have removed from our embraces those we 
hold most dear. Let us not judge by fallible 
sense Him who in perfect wisdom, perfect 
love, is ordering for the best. Now we see 
through a glass, darkly ; but the time is com- 
ing when we shall see face to face, when we 
shall understand it all. 

"God's plans, like lilies pure and white, unfold ; 
We must not tear the close-shut leaves apart, 
Time will reveal the calyxes of gold." 

Ah! dear friends, in that last parting hour, 
when we are summoned to hear those "many 
things" Christ has reserved for our ears, if 
we shall feel that we have sincerely tried to 



196 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES 

serve Jesus and are deserving, through his 
merits, of admission to the employments of 
heaven — what pen can describe, what tongue 
express the peace, the rapture that shall be 
ours in this prospect of immediate restoration 
to the bosoms of those we love ! God give 
us grace so to live this life of probation that, 
when we come into the presence of Him by 
whom and in whom the sundered souls that 
are dearer to us than all the interests of life 
are even to-day growing in beauty and loveli- 
ness, we may be adjudged worthy to mingle 
with them in a communion whose joys tran- 
scend the imagination of man ; in an eternal, 
indissoluble companionship. 

Psychology, much as it would wish to, can- 
not say this to us. Orthodox science has no 
consolation to offer when the doleful sable 
tells its story of another-loved one summoned 
to join the circle of those who wait upon the 
farther shore. Spiritism sets us aghast with 
its doctrine of a woman God ; its denial of the 
vicarious sacrifice of Christ ; its teachings 
regarding marriage, which are subversive of 
all respect for the institution as ordained of 
Heaven ; its constitution of every man as his 
own Christ and of free love as the ideal of 
social happiness, while pretending to attemper 






OF CHRISTIANITY. 197 

our sorrows by placing us in communication 
with separated souls. It is faith alone that 
can bridge the gulf of death, and keep us in 
spiritual fellowship with those we hold most 
dear. Assuredly, the possibility of such faith 
is a most impressive proof of the soul's 
immortality. 



What is Christianity More than Christian Science ? 

(For the time will come when they will not endure sound doc- 
trine ; but after their own lusts shall they heap to themselves 
teachers, having itching ears ; and they shall turn away their 
ears from the truth, and shall be turned unto fables. 2 Tim. iv. 
3,4.) 

I extract from Guyau's " The Non-Re- 
ligion of the Future " this characteristic dec- 
laration of modern infidelity: 

" The time is at hand when religious proph- 
ets will be replaced by great poets, great 
metaphysicians, great men of science. Each 
of us will be able to choose his own prophet, 
to prefer the genius which is best adapted to 
his personal intelligence and best serves as 
an intermediary between him and the eternal 
Truth ; and each of us will be in the last re- 
sort his own priest." 

Alas ! there is justification for such a state- 
ment. Religious prophets are everywhere 
betraying their trust. The understanding re- 
volts at the spurious interpretations so-called 
ministers of Christ are placing on the eternal 
words of God. Reverence shudders at the 
prominence they give to man and his antics 
in the temples of the Almighty, where abso- 



EVIDENCES OF CHRISTIANITY. 199 

lute simplicity alone is appropriate as the 
grandest compliment the finite being can pay 
to the Infinite. Sensibility is shocked at the 
plebeian and unfeeling manner in which they 
bandy the utterances inspired by the Holy 
Spirit. Taste shrinks from their affectation 
of the offensively grotesque in pronunciation, 
choice of words, manner of delivery, and cos- 
tume, and shuts her ears to their micaceous 
styles aglist with the cheap sparkle of a fac- 
titious rhetoric. Consistency blushes at their 
denunciation of the Bible as a misleading 
gloss, at their double discount of the veracity 
of the New Testament, and their consequent 
repudiation by one Christian church only to 
be cheerfully welcomed by another with their 
budget of heretical views. What wonder that 
intellect is driven from our churches to swell 
the ranks of agnosticism and irreligion ! 
What wonder that the Son of God is shelved, 
and every man aspires to be his own high 
priest ! What wonder that the Holy Spirit 
is frozen out, and the weak brother so impa- 
tiently turns from Christianity falsely so 
called to try the spirit of every new Ism that 
is advertised ! 

I believe it is this shifting notion of what 
constitutes Christianity, due to the splinter- 



2oo ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES 

ing of our faith into so many different phases 
of doctrine ; this conspicuous lack of church 
uniformity which is unfortunately construed 
by the superficial observer to mean lack of 
church unity — that has contributed most to 
the prevailing indifferentism and unrest, and 
made possible and even popular the insidious 
attacks of Antichrist in the form of oriental 
fata-niorgana or behind the mask of up-to- 
date economic democracy and self-seeking 
business love. 

Among the present foes of Christianity, I 
reckon none more dangerous than so-called 
Christian Science, which comes in the guise 
of a good Samaritan, with a metaphysical 
remedy for disease in one hand and a mil- 
dewed theosophy in the other. To the piv- 
otal doctrines of this new religion I ask your 
attention this morning. They are to be found 
in a book entitled " Science and Health, with 
Key to the Scriptures," by the Rev. Mary 
Baker G. Eddy of Concord, N. H., the chief 
expounder of the system. This work — a 
volume of 665 pages, of which 150,000 copies 
are in circulation — is styled by Christian 
Scientists "the Bible-and-Book," " the only 
ordained pastor " of 300 American churches 
erected by the adherents of the sect, and 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 201 

cepted as their gospel by at least one million 
persons in the United States. 

A determination to learn what this Chris- 
tian Science as a practical religion really is 
led me, on the evening of Friday, April 22d, 
1898, to attend service at the First Church 
of Christ Scientist, No. 137 West Forty- 
eighth Street, New York. A large congre- 
gation, in which bonnets predominated, was 
in attendance. The exercises opened with 
the singing of a hymn, followed by the read- 
ing of Psalm xci. with passages from "Science 
and Health." Silent prayer (not to God) 
was next announced, at the termination of 
which the lady in charge made a long ad- 
dress, blazoned as extemporaneous, but which 
smelt phenomenally of the lamp. The prin- 
cipal point made by the speaker was that 
the ninety-first psalm, which had been re- 
peated and chanted for two thousand years, 
had never been understood until Christian 
Science made plain its mystic meaning. The 
"secret place of the Most High " is the Ego, 
or realm of spiritual thought, into which the 
person conversant with Christian Science 
methods can retire at will ; and when once 
ensconced in this temple of his interior he 
realizes the idea of the Psalmist and all dis- 



202 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES 

ease and sin "gravitate away from him." He 
is no longer in danger of the pestilence that 
walketh in darkness. 

In the course of the address, matter was 
pronounced an illusion ; the giving and taking 
of drugs was deprecated as criminal ; and 
publicity was given to a number of remark- 
able cures, all which might have been mere 
coincidences — post hoes rather than propter 
hoes — or at most the results of telepathy. For 
example, a man returns from his business all 
but maniacal with a neuralgic headache. 
While he is pacing the floor in agony, his 
wife seeks " a healer," whose treatment is as 
follows : " Go home and tell your husband 
that physical suffering is an illusion. There 
is no such thing; he has no headache." Armed 
with this prescription, the sympathetic wife 
starts for the chamber of suffering, to find that 
at the very time the words above were ut- 
tered by the healer the headache left her 
husband and he became himself again. At 
the invitation of the speaker, whose eyes 
rolled dramatically as she rehearsed the par- 
ticulars of a number of such cures, men and 
women arose from their seats and " testified," 
proclaiming their obligation to Christian 
Science. Tic douloureux,grip,deafness, quinsy, 






OF CHRISTIANITY. 203 

neurasthenia, even business cares, financial 
distress, imminent bankruptcy, disappeared 
or lost their sting under similar treatment. 
One lady testified that her spectacles were 
blown off by the wind and smashed on the 
sidewalk, leaving her helpless. Instead of re- 
pairing to an opticians and having a new pair 
of glasses fitted to her eyes, she bethought 
her of a neighboring Christian Science healer, 
who promptly relieved her hypermetropic as- 
tigmatism by simply telling her that her eyes 
were all right and glasses were superfluous. 
Since this episode her sight has been per- 
fect. 

A subsequent investigation of Mrs. Eddy's 
own church in Concord revealed still sleazier 
" springes to catch woodcocks/' 

Apart from the ludicrous features of such 
exhibitions, it is sad to think that persons ap- 
parently intelligent should be so susceptible 
to imposture, so ready to accept the prepos- 
terous tenets of this new religion, the ma- 
terial object of which is manifestly the enrich- 
ment of its " healers " and authors at the 
expense of gulls. But these days of higher 
education and emancipation for woman 
awaken in some women activities that seek 
illicit and perilous outlets. The platform 



2o 4 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES 

and the pulpit offer to such unstable minds 
overpowering attractions ; and when to the 
glamour of public life is added the prestige 
that attends the promulgation of a new 
faith — the brummagem notoriety of the claim 
to a new revelation from a Mother as well as 
a Father God to a woman who poses as a 
female Christ — a respectable fraction of the 
sex thus favored falls promptly into line. 
The temptation to exchange their normal 
positions as centers of love and joyousness in 
the home-circle for offices environed by flat- 
terers and fame-mongers proves irresistible, 
the allurement of the craze for ephemeral 
distinction, of the opportunity to be admired 
by imbeciles for gabbling nonsense. 

To these Christian Science converts, the 
assertions of Mrs. Eddy and her feminine 
vicars are as unintelligible as they are to 
Mrs. Eddy herself. The text-books of this 
woman are a gallimaufry of disconnected, 
rambling, vacuous postulates. By way of 
example : " Love thine enemies is identical 
with Thou hast no enemies ; because your 
enemies are your best friends." " He who is 
ignorant of hygienic law is more receptive of 
spiritual power." (Why ?) " We need a clean 
body, rendered pure by mind, not by matter" 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 205 

(that is, by imagination instead of soap and 
water). Under the heading, " Dirt and Hap- 
piness," Mrs. Eddy says: " A hint may be 
taken from the emigrant, whose filth does not 
affect his happiness." (Personal uncleanliness 
is thus indorsed.) " According to the Scrip- 
tures, I find that every man is a liar." The 
Scriptures nowhere commit themselves to 
such a doctrine. In the Third Chapter of 
Romans, Paul says, in arguing the preroga- 
tive of the Jews, Let every (unbelieving) 
man be a liar if necessary for the justifica- 
tion of God. 

The replies in her " Questions and An- 
swers" are artful evasions or mawkish pa- 
lavers. To the question, " Can Christian 
Science cure acute cases, like membranous 
croup?" is affixed the answer: "It cannot 
fail to heal in every case of disease, when 
conducted by one who understands it." Of 
course that one has never as yet material- 
ized. In the epidemic of membranous croup 
or diphtheria at Woodsville, N. H., in the 
fall of 1897, Christian Scientists treated 
some of the cases with such appalling results 
as to rouse the indignation of the medical 
profession throughout the State. From the 
medico-legal standpoint, the treatment was 



2o6 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES 

equivalent to criminal neglect. There is~ no 
authenticated case on record in which Chris- 
tian Science has " healed " (if by " healed " is 
meant removed) organic disease where medi- 
cal science had failed — the pet falsehood of 
its pulpit firebrands. The boast that this 
school is "forced to receive most of its pa- 
tients from the incurable list of medical 
practice," is mere pibble-pabble. 

Again, " Because God is supreme, materia 
medica and hygiene are impotent." For the 
same reason might be added, with equal con- 
sistency, food stuffs are of no avail, and wash- 
ing is an insult to the Most High, "their 
only supposed efficacy lying in apparently 
deluding reason." 

In " Science and Health," Mrs. Eddy pro- 
claims herself the discoverer of the adapta- 
tion of truth to the treatment of disease as 
well as of sin — a most impudent fabrication, 
for this principle has been practiced since 
the days of the patriarchs and prophets. 
Truth is the conformity of thought with fact, 
of a statement or belief with reality, and for 
Mrs. Eddy to lay claim to priority in apply- 
ing truth to the cure of sin and the treat- 
ment of disease is an insult to American en- 
lightenment or an incontrovertible proof of 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 207 

her own amentia or dotage. Mrs. Eddy- 
places herself as a healer on a par with Jesus 
Christ, although she floats in an atmosphere 
far above his social level. The contrast is 
conspicuous between Eddy, inaccessible in 
her palace or driven about the capital of 
New Hampshire, arrayed in purple, like a 
queen in her victoria ; and her alleged pro- 
totype, the lowly, approachable, sympathetic 
Jesus, who had not where to lay his head; 
who did not accumulate wealth by his serv- 
ices as a healer, but went about footsore and 
heart-sick in his mission of love. " Like 
Jesus," she says, " the healer should speak to 
disease as one having authority over it." In 
this way she claims to have " changed secre- 
tions, elongated shortened limbs, renewed 
structure, restored the lost substance of 
lungs, and established healthy organizations 
where disease was organic." This is equiva- 
lent to the assumption of divine power over 
the laws of nature, an assumption that is not 
surprising on the part of a woman who de- 
clares that " God has been fitting me, during 
many years, for the reception of a final rev- 
elation of the absolute principle of scientific 
mind-healing." 

It was the metaphysics of Jesus — mark 



2o8 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES 

well — not Jesus, that healed the sick. Jesus 
Christ healed by Christian Science ; why, 
then, should not Mrs. Eddy ? And if Mrs. 
Eddy, why not a legion of aspirants to the 
divine office ? " The miracles of Jesus Christ 
did not belong to a dispensation now ended ; 
but they illustrate," continues this fanatic, 
" an ever-operative divine principle " — re- 
cently become operative again, after a re- 
tirement of eighteen centuries, in the art of 
Mrs. Eddy, who presumptuously lays claim 
to that power over nature possessed by the 
God of nature alone ; that power which 
opened the eyes of the congenitally blind, 
cleansed the lepers neoplasms, and bade the 
sepulcher give up its dead. 

Christian Scientists point to the seventeenth 
and eighteenth verses of the last chapter of 
St. Mark's gospel in defense of their theory 
that Christ gives the power of healing to all 
believers : " And these signs shall follow them 
that believe ; In my name shall they cast out 
devils ; they shall speak with new tongues ; 
They shall take up serpents ; and if they 
drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them. 
They shall lay hands on the sick, and they 
shall recover." 

In the first place, the promise was mani- 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 209 

festly made only to the immediate converts 
of the first century. In the Diatessaron, or 
Harmony of the Four Canonical Gospels 
compiled in the second century by Tatianus 
the Syrian, the tense is past : " These signs 
shall follow them that have believed on me." 

In the second place, the Greek does not 
bear the interpretation placed upon it, 
namely, that all sick persons on whom the 
early disciples should lay hands would re- 
cover. The exact translation is : " They shall 
place their hands on those who are not 
strong (dppuoTovg — weakly persons, conva- 
lescents) and they shall do well (aaXuq efrvoivy 
If this power of healing had been trans- 
mitted to all Christian believers, disease 
would long ago have vanished from the 
world. 

In the third place, the whole passage is 
pronounced by modern scholarship to be an 
interpolation introduced into Mark's report 
at an early period, when various forms of 
evangelical tradition, written or oral, were 
still extant. With this fact, it is not to be 
presumed that Christian Science dreamers 
are conversant. 

Continues Mrs. Eddy in M Science and 

Health : " " Denial of the possibility of Christ 

n 



210 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES 

tian healing robs Christianity of the very ele- 
ment which gave it divine force and its aston- 
ishing success in the first century." The false- 
hood of this statement is transparent. It 
was not the skill of its teachers in the heal- 
ing art that made Christianity the intel- 
lectual and moral conqueror of the heathen 
world ; but it was its spiritual quality, its 
character-transforming quality, its soul-sub- 
duing quality, its message to the despairing 
of a blessed eternity. It was because it con- 
strained the assassin to spare, and the liber- 
tine to pause, and the outraged to forgive, 
that Christianity was enabled to win its 
treasures from the very hot-beds of Roman 
depravity. Christ crucified, not Christ the 
healer, was and is its central figure. 

Once more : " God does not employ drugs or 
hygiene, else Jesus would have recommended 
and used them in his healing." Hygiene im- 
plies cleanliness, and Mrs. Eddy is recom- 
mended to count the number of times the 
word clean occurs in the Bible. There is 
more hygiene, or sanitary science, in the 
Bible than in any other existing book not a 
monograph ; sanitary science anticipatory of 
that of to-day in its safeguards against dis- 
ease. It would seem that Mrs. Eddy has 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 211 

been sitting in judgment on God's sanitary 
laws without ever looking into them. The 
vital statistics of the Jews in various parts of 
the world — the people who observe the hy- 
gienic laws of Moses — show that the death- 
rate of this race is everywhere lower than 
that of the Christian or Muhammadan people 
among whom they live ; that they have fewer 
still-born children, greater average longevity, 
and less liability to certain forms of disease, 
including tuberculosis and scrofula, than 
other races — and all this amid an environ- 
ment of poverty and squalor. Nothing but 
crass ignorance or deliberate intention to de- 
ceive could have led to the statement quoted 
above. Moreover, the astonishing success 
attending capital operations in modern hos- 
pitals, due entirely to surgical cleanliness, 
clearly demonstrates what may be accom- 
plished by a pains-taking Christian regard 
for well-understood hygienic laws. 

And as to medicines, we read of Hebrew 
physicians and their healing with drugs from 
Exodus on. Solomon was a proficient in 
materia medica. Luke practiced medicine at 
Antioch. perhaps at Troas ; and the skill 
of " the beloved physician M is known to have 
been such that his services were in demand 



212 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES 

among the Asiatic Greeks. Did not God 
cry with the voice of Jeremiah, in bewailing 
the desperate estate of the Jews, " Is there no 
balm in Gilead ; is there no physician there ? 
Why then is not the health of the daughter 
of my people recovered ? " This certainly 
implies the divine sanction of medical treat- 
ment, and faith in its success on the part of 
the patient. Farther on, in the same book, 
we read : " Thus saith the Lord, Thy bruise 
is incurable, and thy wound is grievous. . . . 
Thou hast no healing medicines." Others 
have, who are not incurable; but in this case 
Jacob, his servant, was not susceptible to the 
effects of medicines on account of the " mul- 
titude " of his iniquity. " They that be whole 
need not a physician, but they that are sick," 
are our Saviours words, and they give un- 
questionable sanction to the practice of med- 
icine and the use of drugs. Jesus did not 
depend on the efficacy of medicine in his mir- 
acles of healing. Mrs. Eddy is in this in- 
stance correct. He did what she cannot do ; 
he commanded as God. Mrs. Eddy may de- 
cry medical interference from her standpoint, 
but she is not justified in so doing by the 
teachings of this Bible. He who believes in 
Jewish and early Christian practices must 






OF CHRISTIANITY. 213 

then, believe in administering approved 
drugs as occasion requires. 

The clerical profession cannot heal the 
soul, cannot remit sins ; it is God alone who 
does this. But its office is to direct souls to 
God, of whom they may obtain forgiveness 
by the employment of God-appointed means 
and in God-appointed ways. In precisely 
the same manner, the office of the medical 
profession is to avert the physical consequen- 
ces of carelessness, ignorance, or sin, through 
the means God has placed at its disposal. 
We have no right to withhold the curative 
medicine, the drug, whatever it may be, that 
poisons the protoplasm of the offending 
bacillus or fortifies the human system against 
the ravages of an exaggerated destructive 
metamorphosis. Those who do so, trusting to 
prayer alone, faith, metaphysics, or autohyp- 
notism — those who fail to observe every pre- 
caution and to do their human utmost to save 
the sick in accordance with the latest devel- 
opments of medical and sanitary science — 
are murderers, under the Christian interpre- 
tation of the law, " Thou shalt not kill." The 
argument that " God does not provide drugs 
for human use " is childish. Drugs are the 
means provided by the Almighty for prevent- 



2i 4 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES 

ing, curing, or alleviating disease ; and they 
are just as much a means, in God's provi- 
dence, as is food for sustaining the powers of 
body and mind ; as is water for dissolving 
and floating off waste products ; as is sleep 
for restoring broken nerve currents and can- 
celing the oxygen deficit in the brain. The 
argument of Mrs. Eddy, if extended, would 
climax in such absurdities as the following: 
God did not provide clothes for human be- 
ings to wear. They should go nude, imagin- 
ing themselves warm and screened from one 
another's sight. God did not provide shelter 
for their protection ; let them stand out at 
the mercy of the elements and by some 
clever concentration of mental energy dispel 
the illusions of hot and cold, soft and hard, 
wet and dry. 

11 The human mind," says Mrs. Eddy, " uses 
one error as a medicine for another. It seeks 
to oppose malice with revenge, to quiet pain 
with morphine." Morphine — an alkaloid, not 
an error — is an indispensable agent in treat- 
ing inflammatory conditions. Every one is 
aware that the abuse of the drug is the source 
of untold suffering among men. So is the 
abuse of tea, the abuse of food, the abuse of 
common salt (the salt habit induces diseases 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 215 

of the kidneys and the skin), the abuse of 
clothes, the abuse of pleasure-taking; all 
harmless, if temperately indulged in, all 
causes of physical, moral, or spiritual disease 
if used to excess. It is perfectly justifiable to 
quiet pain with morphine. For that purpose 
the Lord provided this very principle, which 
has been known to man as meconium, an ex- 
tract from the poppy plant, for twice a thou- 
sand years ; perhaps for another millennium 
as the nepenthes, or sorrow-removing, pain- 
subduing drug of Jove-born Helena. 

To extract a final passage from Mrs. 
Eddy's" Key to the Scriptures," embodying a 
malicious thrust both at religion and the sci- 
ence of medicine : " The ancient Christians 
were healers. Why has this element of Chris- 
tianity been lost ? Because our systems of 
religion are governed by our systems of med- 
icine. The first idolatry was faith in matter ; 
the schools have rendered faith in drugs the 
fashion, rather than faith in Deity." 

This smacks of "the new journalism." If 
the woman is not demented, she must be 
aware that no school of medicine antagonizes 
the faith the sick man has in his God and the 
hope he may entertain of cure from the use 
of drugs. The two faiths, as she calls them, 



216 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES 

have no common ground of meeting. They 
are utterly dissimilar, as distinct as is the faith 
manifested in the morning prayer for guid- 
ance and forgiveness from the faith in the 
nutritive qualities of the articles of diet that 
constitute the morning meal. When a mem- 
ber of a Christian household is dangerously 
sick, the relatives do not sit down and fold 
their arms in hopeless helplessness, both giv- 
ing up and giving in. Nor do they bid the 
sick person persuade himself that his pain and 
danger are illusory. But they make use of 
all the means science is master of to save or 
prolong his life ; and in the hope that the 
prayer of faith may raise the sick they add 
their petitions, but couched in language that 
leaves the question open to the superior 
judgment of God. This is Christian faith in 
its highest exercise, a faith which, in submit- 
ting the issue to a Personal Wisdom that can- 
not err and to a Personal Love that cannot 
fail, far transcends the theosophical self-assu- 
rance of Christian Science. It is this attitude 
in the Christian patient and the Christian 
physician that effectually gives the lie to Mrs. 
Eddy's assertion, " Material medicine substi- 
tutes drugs for the power of God." 

The treatment of the Christian Science 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 217 

healer is the antipode of that just described. 
His aim is " to destroy the patients belief in 
the physical condition by silently and audibly 
arguing the opposite facts," representing man 
as healthful instead of diseased, and showing 
that it is impossible for matter to suffer, to 
feel pain or heat or thirst, to be confined to a 
sick room. If the case to be mentally treated 
is consumption (directs Mrs. Eddy), "show 
that the tubercles, hemorrhage, and decom- 
position, are beliefs only — images of thought 
superimposed on the body ; that they should 
be treated as error and put out of thought. 
Then they will disappear." This is arrant 
quackery, and people treating tuberculosis in 
this way should be placed behind bars. Tu- 
bercular consumption depends on the pres- 
ence of a well-known bacillus whose growth 
ultimately leads to the destruction of lung 
tissue. It has nothing to do with fear (a 
favorite theory of Mrs. Eddy's), and can never 
be subdued by any "belief of the mortal 
mind." If taken in time, under certain con- 
ditions the ravages of the parasitic plant may 
be checked. Christian Science sophists assert 
that disease is an illusion, there is no such 
thing. Then they proceed, with pompous 
mouthing, to " heal " the thing that does not 



218 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES 

exist ; and end in a parade of wing-flapping 
and delirious crowing over the conquest of 
an enemy which they have pronounced purely 
imaginary. 

We might go on for hours rummaging this 
literary rubbish-heap, this parody on logic, 
" Science and Health, With Key to the Scrip- 
tures," the Bible of the Christian Science 
sect. But enough has been quoted to dem- 
onstrate the harlequinade. As the Talmud 
says, " The more flesh, the more worms." 

Yet Christian Science treatment does re- 
lieve the sick. It quiets pain, cures certain 
disorders and, more than this, it singularly 
elevates the moral, emotional, and intellectual 
nature of those who trustfully submit to it. 
The falsehood and the danger of the system 
are encountered in the barefaced endeavor of 
the impostors who are giving it publicity to 
prove a mission of divine origin, and thus to 
bolster its authority by miracle-mongering. 

Christian Science effects its seemingly as- 
tonishing cures through means well known 
to every psychologist and educated physician : 
hypnotism and auto-suggestion. 

The phenomena of hypnotism are scien- 
tifically explicable on the supposition of a 
double Ego, a duplex personality, implying 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 219 

two distinct states of consciousness — one, 
called the Primary Consciousness, involving 
the minds recognition of its own acts ; the 
other, called the Secondary Consciousness, 
holding those mental processes and proce- 
dures of which we have no knowledge. That 
is, each human being is one individual with 
two distinct phases of existence. Now it is 
this secondary consciousness, subjective mind, 
or subliminal self, that is amenable in hyp- 
nosis to what is called Suggestion, or the in- 
sinuation of a belief, impulse, or image into 
the mind of the subject by emphatic declara- 
tion. While the patient is in the hypnotic 
state his subliminal self dominates his objec- 
tive intellect and his objective will, and the 
suggestions impressed upon it directly and 
positively are fulfilled at the time and after 
waking. 

Both Christian Science healer and hypno- 
tist seek to alleviate pain by arousing in the 
subject the idea that it does not exist, and 
each obtains control of the secondary con- 
sciousness to effect his purpose. In ordinary 
hypnotism there are two distinct conditions : 
lethargy, or the inactive stage, and somnam- 
bulism, or the alert stage. The first is a con- 
dition of deep sleep ; the second, one of ex- 



220 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES 

alted mind power and increased physical 
activity in which the subject lives an unreal 
life that he remembers nothing of after 
awaking. But his subliminal self unhesita- 
tingly accepts, in either of these stages, every 
emphatic statement or direction of the hypno- 
tizer, no matter how it may conflict with ste- 
reotyped convictions and every-day experi- 
ence. And, what is still stranger, suggestions 
for post-hypnotic fulfillment are carried out 
to the letter sometimes for months after the 
treatment. In this way are banished from a 
sufferer's life (I speak from my own expe- 
rience as a physician) melancholia, morbid 
fears, delusions, folie du doute ; natural sleep 
returns to the couch of the insomniac ; the 
physical functions of digestion, absorption, 
and circulation are stimulated ; functional 
disorders are permanently cured and serious 
organic diseases substantially relieved. 

Reputable physicians in Europe, as well as 
in America, are reporting cases by the thou- 
sand in which hypnotism has acted as a pal- 
liative or cure. These cases include not only 
functional nervous disorders like hysteria, 
chorea, occupation neuroses, and insomnia, 
but also diseases in which pain is a prominent 
symptom, as sciatica, angina, and rheumatic 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 221 

affections ; and even such incurable maladies 
as tuberculosis, locomotor ataxia, and can- 
cer. The nervous systems are controlled, the 
appetite is improved, and sleep is secured by 
the establishment of functional harmony 
through the power of suggestion. 

The special means, however, to which the 
Christian Scientist has recourse in his " heal- 
ing" procedures is Auto-suggestion. It is to 
be remembered that the subjective mind of a 
given individual is as amenable to suggestion 
by his own objective mind as by the objective 
mind of an outside personality. Such sug- 
gestion by an objective consciousness to its 
own subjective consciousness is called auto- 
suggestion. The part that self-induced hyp- 
notism of this nature plays in the drama of 
human life is little suspected by the mass of 
men. It governs physiological changes ; it 
controls the number of births on the higher 
levels of society; it renders immune from dis- 
ease, or prepares the soil for the reception of 
bacteria; it explains much self-deception, and 
at the same time much of that concentration 
of mind on elevating ideals which, when 
called into being by the eloquence of a Wes- 
ley or a Moody, has snatched thousands, 
without resolution or even consciousness on 



222 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES 

their part of its presence, from the clutches 
of sin. 

It is the " I won't die" that makes a man 
live twenty years of usefulness when his phy- 
sicians have given him but a month of mis- 
ery. It was the " I will live " that lifted John 
Wickliffe from the pallet of death in the 
presence of taunting friars, and indued him 
with physical and mental energy to translate 
the word of God into the majestic Anglo- 
Hebraic of the fourteenth century. 

The subliminal self is the medium of ex- 
pression for hereditary propensities, and the 
voice through which genius speaks. Hence 
it may be argued with no small show of 
reason, that the subliminal self of Stratford's 
butcher-boy created the deathless plays of 
Shakespeare. 

I am not to be understood as meaning to 
substitute auto-suggestion for the grace of 
God. Yet in the providence of God, auto- 
suggestion is made possible by his fusion in 
the single mind of a double consciousness, 
and who will deny that his saving grace, as 
well as the malignant power of Satan, may 
operate through this means ? Who will con- 
tend that, having disclosed to us this mighty 
instrumentality, God does not intend us to 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 223 

make a proper use of it? The error of 
Christian Science consists in regarding auto- 
suggestion, not as the means whereby the grace 
is conveyed, but as the saving grace itself. 

A striking characteristic of hypnotism is 
its power to elevate the moral status of the 
subject and give him a more nearly perfect 
control over his mental as well as his physi- 
cal organization. This is what Christian Sci- 
ence patients refer to when they say they feel 
better, experience a change, can endure busi- 
ness reverses more resignedly, can overcome 
obstacles more easily. Mrs. Eddy is right in 
maintaining that the tendency of mental 
healing is to uplift mankind. A third field 
has opened to the scientific hypnotist, and one 
which is sure to prove of the greatest inter- 
est and utility — the educational field ; and 
scientific men are studying the influence 
which may be exerted by hypnotism in the 
development of minds and the betterment 
of morals. To-day, alcoholic drunkards ac- 
cept the suggestion that drink is their most 
dangerous enemy, and reform ; abusers of 
drugs desist at the command of a highminded 
operator ; kleptomaniacs, moral perverts, 
criminals of all kinds, where they can be 
brought into rapport with a hypnotist of 



224 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES 

strong Christian convictions, are obliqued 
from the career that leads to ruin. We need 
not go to Christian Science for wonders in 
the line of metaphysical healing. Persons 
in search of treatment by suggestibility are 
advised to shun the mountebanks of this 
cult and have recourse to a reputable neu- 
rologist. 

The methods in vogue among Christian 
Scientists of treating the dangerously or 
hopelessly sick, by appeal to the subliminal 
self, are unchristian and inhuman ; so much 
so that repressive legislation is widely de- 
manded for the protection of society from a 
legion of charlatans whom existing laws do 
not reach, and who are thus left at liberty to 
denounce the wholesome measures of sani- 
tary science, to assume responsibility for the 
most dangerous forms of disease, and to 
trifle ad libitum with human life. 

Finally, Christian Science viewed through 
the lens of theology is practically panthe- 
ism ; a pantheism refracted from the ancient 
Vedanta philosophy, with its illusion theory 
of the outer world, through the dazzling 
prism of modern theosophy. The funda- 
mental doctrines of the new religion are 
stated by Mrs. Eddy in four propositions 






OF CHRISTIANITY. 225 

which she says "will be found to agree in 
statement and proof even if read backward." 

" I. God is All. All is God. 

"II. God is Good. God is Mind. 

"III. God, Spirit, being all, nothing is mat- 
ter. 

" IV. Life, God, omnipotent Good, deny 
death, evil, sin, disease. Disease, sin, evil, 
death, deny Good, omnipotent God, Life." 

The rankest pantheism — God is all and 
all is God ! Spiritistic pantheists adhere to 
the first proposition ; materialistic pantheists 
to the second. 

God, Man, and Nature, are one. " Man," 
says Mrs. Eddy, " is co-eternal and co-exist- 
ent with God." The universe is identical 
with God. There is no finite soul. There is 
no matter. And this recalls the dream of 
Professor Tyndall, who suddenly (he tells us) 
saw, as if lit by a stream of light, the whole 
universe traversed by lines of force, and 
these lines in their ceaseless tremors pro- 
ducing light and radiant heat. And dashing- 
forward on the trail of his ideas, and thrilled 
into creation by the emotion he felt, he de- 
clared these lines were the lines of gravita- 
ting force and that the gravitating force itself 
constituted matter. Force and matter were 

15 



226 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES 

identical — matter or substance, and force or 
tendency to acceleration. This is the intoxi- 
cation of science. 

Pantheism must deny the moral personal- 
ity of God as well as that of man, who is 
only an illusion. It is the concentrated es- 
sence of ancient heathenism, and moderns 
who embrace it, whether they style them- 
selves Christian Scientists or Esoteric Bud- 
dhists, are pagans without the pale. 

Christianity teaches the immanence of 
God ; his omnipresence in Nature and in 
man ; an organic relationship between Cre- 
ator and things created ; but it explicitly as- 
serts that, while the universe exists by and 
through God, it is not what God is. There 
is a Force which is not Me. 

Mrs. Eddy declares also for preexistence, 
and thus announces her belief in reincarna- 
tion — probably obtained from dabblers in 
modern Hinduism, as she is presumably igno- 
rant of the Upanishads. " If man did not 
exist before his material organization began," 
she maintains, " he could not exist after the 
body is disintegrated " — a palpable non-sequi- 
tur. " If we live after death we must have 
lived before birth." Why? Because I, I, I 
itself, I, Mary Baker Glover Eddy, the Ameri- 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 227 

can Blavatsky, say so ! Eddys autos epha 
seems to be all that is required to give cur- 
rency to the veriest balderdash. One Carol 
Norton, the oracle of the cult in New York, 
declares that "Christian Science is synony- 
mous with common sense." This is quite 
likely to be true, as ninety per cent of what 
is denominated common sense is unqualified 
nonsense. 

And how does Christian Science regard 
the Saviour of the world ? Spiritists call 
him a medium : Neo-Buddhists, a Mahatma ; 
Muhammadans, a prophet ; Mrs. Eddy harps 
upon the theory that Jesus was a mere 
demonstrator of Christian Science ! The 
agony of the Son of God on the evening 
preceding his passion she flippantly explains 
as due to a consciousness of the prevailing 
error that matter is real ; and the death of 
Christ on the cross for the sins of the world 
is, from her standpoint, only " an example 
and proof of divine science." In boasting of 
her metaphysical treatment as a reappear- 
ance of the divine power exercised by Jesus 
Christ, this woman is guilty of as shocking 
blasphemy as the Jews of old who cried, 
" He casteth out devils by Beelzebub!" 

" Jesus of Nazareth," she patronizingly 



228 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES 

says, " was the most scientific man that ever 
trod the globe ; " he was only a man, how- 
ever. Christ was the spiritual part of him, 
Jesus the material ; a dual personality ! Chris- 
tianity, on the contrary, affirms that " two 
whole and perfect Natures, that is to say, the 
Godhead and Manhood, were joined to- 
gether in one Person, the Son, which is the 
Word of the Father, never to be divided — 
whereof is one Christ, Very God and Very 
Man, who truly suffered to reconcile his 
Father to us and to be a sacrifice for the 
sins of men." 

Christian Science is pronouncedly anti- 
christian in that it covers a nineteenth cen- 
tury woman with the mantle of Jesus Christ 
by making her the recipient of a revelation 
whereby she is invested with the secret of 
his miracles and clothed with the power to 
perform them. Its worship is a cunning 
counterfeit of that of the Church Catholic, 
its claims are blasphemous in the extreme, 
and its teachings are subversive of the sacred 
doctrines to which all Christians owe alle- 
giance ; for it denies the vicarious sacrifice of 
Christ, interpreting his atonement as an 
allegory, and withholds from sinners pardon 
through a crucified Redeemer. " Jesus never 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 229 

ransomed man by paying the debt that sin in- 
curs/' declares Mrs. Eddy, and " asking God to 
pardon sin is vain." The Christian Scientist 
has no need of a Saviour, no need of prayer. 
Among the most startling of Mrs. Eddys 
sayings are the statements: "Christ Jesus 
was too good to die " (inference, he did not 
die, neither will Mary Baker Glover Eddy), 
and " Truth appears in the womanhood as 
well as the manhood of God, our divine Father 
and Mother " — the latter a revival of the 
ancient Egyptian, Babylonian, and Hindu 
conception of a female principle in Deity. 
" Mrs. Eddy," cries an enthusiastic C. S. B., 
" has interpreted to a needy world the nature 
of the Divine Maternity." After defaming 
Christ in her printed works, discrediting his 
divinity, casting him out as a spiritual ditch- 
dog, denying his very death, this woman in 
her Easter message to a congregation of 
Scientists at Atlanta welcomes " a risen 
Saviour," a " Christ with grave-clothes laid 
aside," in language calculated with machiavel- 
ian adroitness to blind persons inclined to 
place a charitable construction on her teach- 
ings. Thus she backs the strained rope of 
her mongrel pantheism, while a host of shat- 
terbrains purr their approval. 



230 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES 

Such is the faith that has bewitched so 
many who were once Christians and enticed 
them out of the fold ; so aptly stigmatized by 
Dr. Gordon as " a sort of witches' caldron, in 
which every conceivable heathen and Chris- 
tian heresy is found seething and simmering 
to produce the subtle essence called mental 
medicine." In no other way can its strange 
influence be accounted for than that it is one 
of those delusions assigned by St. Paul to the 
latter days, a device of the devil to focus 
men's hopes on something else than the 
justice and mercy of God. The ulterior ob- 
ject of this mixture of falsehood, contradic- 
tion, sophistry, fog, and moonshine, is to offer 
men and women who have become restless 
under what seem to them the restraints and 
constraints of the Christian religion a 
specious substitute for the simple faith of 
their fathers. And human sheep are found 
to flock in multitudes to its empty feeding- 
troughs at the call of its mala fide shepherds. 
Even persons of superior parts are the gud- 
geons of its metaphysical glitter, giving 
fresh points to Shakespeare's observation : 

" What damned error but some sober brow 
will bless it and approve it with a text." 

Christian Science is a purse-clipping en- 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 231 

terprise a capite ad calcem. It has been 
clever enough to see its opportunity in the 
present epidemic of philosophical intoxication 
which proclaims that a greater religion than 
Christianity, delivered of the relentless de- 
mand for something newer and better by the 
midwife of inordinate conceit, has come upon 
the scene — in the words of one who has 
dropped the Christian plow handles, "to 
glorify humanity in its goodness ; " to sub- 
stitute " a higher, nobler, more beautiful 
conception for the personality of God ; " and 
" to make us all into Messiahs superior to 
those ideas of Jesus that were neither 
original, nor accurate, nor practicable."* 

In the name of the Son of God, the 
Founder of your faith, I caution you against 
the imposture and the cunning overtures of 
its adherents. It is unchristian, antichris- 
tian, godless, Christless. Between this belief 
and the religion of Jesus there can be no 
possible compromise. Accommodation is 
out of the question. One can not be both 
Christian and Christian Scientist. 

* V>. Fay Mills, in the u Metaphysical Magazine" for April, 1S99. 



What is Christianity Mote than Socialism, Com- 
munism, and Economic Democracy? 

(If they say, . . . Cast in thy lot among us ; let us all have one 
purse: my son, walk not thou in the way with them. Prov. i. 
H-I5-) 

Of all the unclean birds that prey upon 
the ignorant, discontented, covetous elements 
of society, the human vultures known as 
Communists, Socialists, Christian Socialists, 
and Collectivists, are at once the most detest- 
able and the most to be feared. For it is 
not the proletariat alone whose passions are 
inflamed by the new " Gospel of Industrial 
Emancipation," with its characteristic remedy 
of legalized theft for the innocent possession 
of wealth, which it declares a crime. Much 
of the instruction given to young men and 
women of the cultured classes is tinctured 
with communistic views, and thus based on 
that modern self-conceit which has a better 
philosophy to offer to the world, a more ex- 
cellent social system, than that of Jesus of 
Nazareth. Such reckless teachings are 
greedily adopted by penniless doctors of 
philosophy whose hands are too white to lay 
hold of the instruments of honest toil, and 



EVIDENCES OF CHRISTIANITY. 233 

who hope that in some general revolution 
against society, which their incendiary ora- 
tory is calculated to incite, they may float 
to the surface and live in position and af- 
fluence at the expense of the common peo- 
ple, whose deliverers from the tyranny of 
wealth they insolently proclaim themselves 
to be. 

And then there is another type of your 
college sensationist who — equally brazen in 
his stand that the state has a right to correct 
all inequalities of wealth by the leveling proc- 
ess of taking from those whom it regards as 
having too much to give to others who im- 
agine they have not enough — insidiously 
bolsters his position by appeal to Revelation. 
He interprets Christianity as a mere variety 
of Socialism ; he expounds the Bible as the 
veritable text-book of communistic doctrines ; 
and he accepts Christ as the greatest Social- 
ist that ever trod the earth. On what princi- 
ple such wresters of Holy Writ become 
possessed with a knowledge of just what 
Jesus " contemplated " with regard to an 
" economic revolution " now storm-centering 
in the world as the result of his teachings — 
how they know that he upheld the broad 
principle of their creed, "The wealth of the 



234 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES 

rich is the robbery of the poor," or looked 
upon " individual property as evidence of 
moral fall," they do not feel called upon to 
explain. Their extraordinary dicta suggest 
the alternative of perfidious intent or intel- 
lectual dystrophy, as there is absolutely no 
justification for modern Socialism or Com- 
munism in the teachings of Christ. The gov- 
ernment of Heaven is anything but com- 
munistic. Jesus responded with affirmative 
emphasis to the question of Pilate, " Art thou 
a King, then ? " and he will judge us in that 
capacity as individuals, not by clans, or septs, 
or communes. Spiritual rewards, he has de- 
clared, will be proportioned to individual 
services. How long such communistic teach- 
ings are to be tolerated in this Christian land, 
God only knows — how long this learned 
swagger is to impose on society ; how long 
sound is to go a mumming as sense and a 
draff-cheap sophistry dipped in the dye-vat 
of impudent assurance to masquerade as 
logic ; how long argument subversive of ex- 
isting systems is to take the place of honest 
Christian endeavor for the amelioration of 
society. 

I have been asked whether Socialists are 
not sincere in their teachings. I have never 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 235 

known one that was not punic. Through all 
their agitation is clearly heard the clink of 
gold. Show me the Socialist who would re- 
fuse the gift of a square covered with build- 
ings in the city of Boston, and I will admit 
his consistency. The only sincere Socialists 
are men without property, who have every- 
thing to gain and nothing to forfeit by a re- 
distribution of wealth ; persons whose circum- 
stances are so exceptionally unfortunate that 
they are willing to barter the sweets of liberty 
for bed and board at the hands of a commu- 
nistic society. 

What now is this Socialism that offers so 
great attractions to turbulent spirits alike 
among the commonalty and the privileged 
classes ? Let us understand clearly its mean- 
ing and the nature of its revolutionary de- 
mands. Then we shall be in a position in- 
telligently to apply to its doctrines the 
touch stones of Gospel truth. 

Whereas definitions of Socialism differ, the 
economic and non-religious doctrines main- 
tained by its most advanced and enlightened 
interpreters — notably Karl Marx, Bosanquet, 
and Dr. Schaffle — are essentially the same 
It is a system, having in view the abolition 
of individual effort and competition on which 



236 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES 

modern society is based, and the substitution 
therefor of cooperative action introducing an 
alleged more equal distribution of the prod- 
ucts of labor. That is, it proposes to sup- 
plant the present method of industrial com- 
petition under which men have lived from the 
beginning, each entitled to the products of 
his own labor and receiving for them a sepa- 
rate compensation regulated in amount by 
their quality and the outside demand — it 
proposes to supplant this system by a new 
method of industrial cooperation whereby it 
is designed that the majority, the laboring 
classes, whose will Socialism accepts as law, 
shall pool their labor in various productive 
establishments, assigning to every member 
his individual work, and distributing among 
all as wages the common produce of all. 
Socialism further implies the joint ownership 
by all members of a community of the instru- 
ments, appliances, and means of production, 
including land and capital, railways, the 
merchant marine, factories, machinery, agricul- 
tural and other implements. Private enter- 
prise, all business as now conducted, is to be 
suspended. All manual laborers are to be 
paid in products and amusements in propor- 
tion to the work done ; and persons whose 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 237 

services imply intellectual application, like 
teachers, physicians, experimenters in science, 
and judges on the bench, are to receive 
shares in the commodities produced by 
national labor, the number of shares being 
governed in each case by the time occupied 
in work useful to the community. 

Socialists propose a distribution of mate- 
rial products among individual producers in 
proportion to their work. This would at 
once occasion the very inequality in the 
wealth distributed that Socialists decry. Ac- 
cumulation must take place in private hands 
and hence a redistribution of private posses- 
sions would shortly be necessitated. I am 
aware that Schaffle holds that Socialism does 
not contemplate a periodic redistribution ; but 
in the nature of things, such would be inevi- 
table. There is no way in which equality can 
be preserved except by the redistribution or 
wanton destruction of private property accu- 
mulated in excess of community regulations. 
Socialism claims to put an end to all inequal- 
ities ; but as it requites labor unequally, ine- 
quality must result from unequal payments. 
The eleventh-hour people do not share in 
this system with the whole-day heat and bur- 
den bearers. Hence to preserve equality of 



238 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES 

possessions, a certain surplus must either be 
destroyed periodically, or periodically redis- 
tributed. The only persons who would profit 
by such an absurd system would be the un- 
deserving poor — the lazy and alcoholic 
paupers. 

Then imagine the scenes on distribution 
day. Who would be contented with the por- 
tion parceled out to him by the public over- 
seers of production. The success of such a 
system involves absolute honesty, which no- 
where exists ; infallible judgment to estimate 
the division fairly, which is inconceivable; 
mental and moral efficiency vastly superior 
to that possessed by the average man. It 
supposes human beings unswayed by jealousy, 
strangers to passion, with low estimates of 
their own services, always contented with 
their apportionment, in every way above 
board. In other words, the success of So- 
cialism is conditioned by the universal prev- 
alence of Gospel Christianity. Given that, 
and no reason can be advanced for the desir- 
ability of Socialism. 

Socialism assumesas a fundamental doctrine 
that labor is the sole constituent of value, and 
regards wealth as transfigured labor and 
hence theft on the part of employers from 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 239 

their employees. All employers are thieves ; 
and all toilers who expend muscular energy 
in producing anything are entitled to all they 
produce. It condones stealing as a mere 
over-violent readjustment of unfairly divided 
values. It distinctly teaches that wage-earn- 
ers always receive in money-wage less than 
the full value of the product of their work ; 
ignoring the fact that labor is a mere factor 
in wealth, that it does not create the materi- 
als or machinery it handles, and that it would 
be helpless if not directed by supreme human 
intelligence. A thing is worth what it will 
sell for in market, whether it be a farm, a 
bushel of potatoes, the manuscript of a story, 
or a day's work. And a laborer is not 
robbed because he receives from a capitalist 
the full market value of his services. The 
Rev. Dr. Behrends * aptly illustrates the point 
in question : — 

"The motorman and the conductor of a 
trolley car might say : ' Our labor makes 
this car run, and therefore we are entitled to 
all the fares which are collected, or at least 
to the largest share of them/ But they did 
not lay the rails, they did not hang the wires, 
they did not build the cars ; and they could 

* In "The Revolutionary Demands of Socialism." 



2 4 o ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES 

not do any of these things if they tried, and 
therefore must pay the men who can. No 
man is going to put his labor at another 
man's disposal without a fair remuneration, 
and the more skilled that labor is, the more 
must be paid for it. Men do not build rail- 
ways and buy cars for fun, any more than 
motormen work for fun. But suppose road- 
ways, and trolley wires, and cars were to be 
had for nothing, can the two men on the 
platforms run the cars? One man collects 
the fares ; the other man turns the current 
on or off, manages the brake, and rings the 
gong. It keeps them busy; but what would 
their work amount to if there were no power- 
houses, no dynamos, no electric current in the 
wires? Nobody needs to pay for the light- 
ning; but not everybody knows how to make 
it available ; and the expensive machinery of 
the power-houses, with the cost of its repair 
and renewal and efficient management, must 
be paid for out of the fares collected. With- 
out it the cars would not move an inch, and 
nobody would pay any fare. The man who 
turns the current on or off, and who handles 
the lever, has at his command millions of in- 
vested capital, not one dollar of which he 
provided, and thousands of skilled workers, 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 241 

without whom his work would be utterly 
unproductive. In all the higher grades 
of industry, it is the machinery which 
gives value to the product, not the man 
who handles the machine. But was not 
the machine made by somebody, and ought 
not the men who made the machine to 
own it and get all the profit out of it ? 
But who made the machine? Can even' 
man who uses a hammer and turns a lathe 
make a machine ? Must you not have the 
inventor and the draughtsman and the 
superintendent of construction ? These men, 
perhaps, work very little with their hands, 
but they work with their heads ; and in 
a world where heads are so necessary, they 
have to be generously paid for." 

Labor must not only have material to 
work on and tools to work with ; it must 
further be encouraged and directed by brains. 
Inventiveness, capacity for management, cour- 
age in the adapting of means to ends, as well 
as manual labor, must be taken into account 
as sources of wealth. Hence the claim of 
labor to the whole product is unjustifiable 
and immoral. 

Socialists brand all private property as 
robbery ! Riches are as much theft as stolen 

16 



242 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES 

goods acquired by violence or fraud. The 
most upright farmer or straightforward 
trader who has worked honestly for his 
humble home and slender income is a robber 
on the same plane as the foot-pad. " No 
saint can own a farm ! " cries one with a mor- 
bidly sensitive social conscience ; but in the 
next breath he contends that a community 
of sinners can. Others demand that all the 
property in the world shall be confiscated 
and then equally distributed. Nationalism, 
or Economic Democracy, is but a phase of 
Socialism. In the words of Edward Bell- 
amy, it also proposes to " deliver society 
from the rule of the rich, and to establish 
economic equality by the application of the 
democratic formula to the production and 
distribution of wealth. It aims to put an 
end to the present irresponsible control of 
the economic interests of the country by 
capitalists pursuing their private ends, and 
to replace it by responsible public agencies 
acting for the general welfare. That is to 
say, it is proposed to harmonize the indus- 
trial and commercial system with the politi- 
cal, by bringing the former under popular 
government, as the latter has already been 
brought, to be administered as the political 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 243 

government is, by the equal voice of all for 
the equal benefit of all." 

Schaffle declares the Alpha and Omega of 
Socialism to be the transformation of pri- 
vate and competing capitals into a united 
collective capital. Note how it is purposed 
to settle with capitalists like the Rothschilds, 
a family reputed to be worth five hundred 
million. This wealth socialistic agitators 
propose to appropriate — in other words, to 
steal — and for fifty years pay the family an 
annuity in the form of provisions, clothing, 
furniture, luxuries, and amusements. In two 
generations its members would be compelled 
to support themselves by manual labor ; and 
if they should object to this — why, let them 
emigrate to a land where Socialistic ideas do 
not prevail. Think of thus taking her prop- 
erty from Helen Gould, who is preeminent 
among American women in deeds of .judi- 
cious charity, and distributing it among the 
depraved classes to dissipate in drunkenness 
and lust! It is this kind of agitation that is 
filling the world with malcontents, with nihil- 
istic robbers and dynamiters. And such 
agitation is unfortunately rendered possible 
by high-handed, dubious, and out-and-out 
immoral procedures in the accumulation and 



244 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES 

expenditure of wealth ; by the sight of gi- 
gantic monopolies, syndicates, and corpora- 
tions unscrupulously managed to starve out 
thousands of humble honest bread-winners, 
and thereby add to the wealth of grasping 
millionaires. 

It is not property that is the root of 
all evil, as Socialists proclaim — but the 
abuse of property, coupled with the spirit of 
covetousness in rich and poor, that inordi- 
nate passion for money and possessions which 
knows no rest by day or night in their eager 
pursuit — that malicious and brutish thirst in 
the low-born for the belongings of those who 
are better-to-do. Money-making has an- 
other side, one that is not ignoble like this 
toiling and hoarding simply to gratify the 
property emotion, but one that is entirely 
praiseworthy from the Christian standpoint 
— accumulating by self-denial and honest toil 
to provide for those we love — for the pure 
women who are the sharers of our joys and 
disappointments ; for children who may en- 
joy educational and social advantages only 
through our unremitting application. And 
what can be nobler and sweeter than the 
devotion of life to the honest acquisition of 
moderate means for loves sake ? Christi- 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 245 

anity indorses such pursuit of riches 1 and 
God Almighty has placed upon it the im- 
print of his sanction in the reward of happi- 
ness that as a rule accompanies it It has 
been convincingly argued that no danger is 
to be feared from the concentration of prop- 
erty in the hands of the servants of Jesus ; 
and of this there are numerous exemplifica- 
tions. Consistent Christian capitalists are 
never industrial oppressors, never parties to 
the widely noised conspiracy of wealth 
against the people. Their gauge of remu- 
neration is its sufficiency for the comfortable 
support of the wage-earner. This I have 
seen grandly illustrated in my study of in- 
dustrial conditions abroad ; and by way of 
example I will ask your attention for a mo- 
ment to the Christian management of the 
worlds great thread works at Paisley, Scot- 
land, as a standing rebuke to such as clamor 
that our religion has invariably failed to es- 
tablish congenial and mutually profitable 
relations between employer and employee. 
The prosperous manufacturers of this town 
carry out practically in their daily inter- 
course and business associations the princi- 
ples of reciprocity as inculcated by Jesus 
Christ. The men and women whose devo- 



246 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES 

tion has rendered them rich in worldly pos- 
sessions are made sharers in their material 
prosperity, and their wealth is freely given 
for the endowment of charitable institutions 
in their native city. These Scottish employ- 
ers further realize that the moral welfare of 
their operatives is intrusted to their keep- 
ing, and that it is made their duty to sur- 
round it with every possible safeguard. As 
a consequence, disaffection, discontent, and 
what is infinitely more deplorable, the en- 
forced adoption of a life of prostitution by 
women employees as an alternative with 
starvation, are unknown. The chaste lives 
of the Paisley mill-girls contrast markedly 
with the depravity that is the reproach of 
our American system ; their cheerful homes 
with the filthy tenements that disgrace our 
great manufacturing centers. 

Generous provision is also made for the 
physical comfort and mental training of the 
operatives. Beside the great Coats mill 
stands a thoroughly equipped school-house, 
erected by the owners for the accommodation 
of " half-timers," or children who receive in- 
struction during three days of the week and 
work in the factory the remainder of the 
time. In addition to this, a sewing-school is 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 247 

provided, where lessons are given free of ex- 
pense in hand and machine sewing. The 
Messrs. Coats have also built a dining-hall 
where factory girls are furnished substantial 
meals for as low as five cents in our money, 
half-timers being supplied at half rates. Ex- 
tensive baths are also connected with the 
establishment for the use of employees ; 
while the clerks have their separate dining- 
hall and reading-room. After twenty years 
of service, in case for any reason they be- 
come incapacitated, deserving operatives are 
pensioned at the rate of two dollars a week, 
which is ample for their support in Scotland ; 
and old and ailing pensioners are sent to the 
seacoast for a month every summer at the 
expense of the firm. The attitude of the 
Coatses toward their servants is generally 
characteristic of the Scottish merchants. The 
rich manufacturer moves among his em- 
ployees as a father, mindful of their interests 
and jealous of their rights ; while they have 
learned to look up to him with all the love 
and respect of confiding children,, If the 
s'pirit that inspires the noble deeds of the 
public-souled men of Paisley should go 
abroad among the mammon-serving employ- 
ers of this land, the abuses that are voiced 



248 



ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES 



on every side would soon be rectified. That 
spirit is the spirit of pure unselfish Chris- 
tianity — the spirit which alone can solve, 
with its divinely quickened insight, the per- 
plexing problems of this age. 

Christian teaching in regard to property 
rights is very clear. Like all other rights, 
they are essentially moral in character ; and 
any employment of power incompatible with 
the free exercise of these rights is immoral, 
and hence of necessity unlawful and unjust. 
We acquire a right to property by the labor 
of our hands or brains, by voluntary ex- 
change, by gift, by will, by inheritance. I 
have a right to the results of my work, to do 
with them as I wish. The product arising 
from the innocent use of my powers is mine, 
not yours ! not some society's ! And in this 
principle is to be found the explanation of 
American prosperity and of American prog- 
ress. May God rebuke and baffle the un- 
American agitators who would have it other- 
wise. If you raise a crop of grain on land 
not previously appropriated, that grain is 
yours by all that is right, and just, and holy ! 
If you build a sawmill and intrust its con- 
duct to employees, it does not follow that 
these employees have a right to the profits 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 249 

of your mill ! Consistent Socialism clearly 
antagonizes the Christian theory of human 
rights — the right to life, liberty, and the free 
choice of means of happiness ; the right of 
self-defense ; the right to trade and get gain ; 
the right to marry, and to train and educate 
children. Man has divine sanction for exer- 
cising all these rights, and no system devised 
by man is justified in their infringement. 
The lawfulness of doing what one pleases 
with ones own was declared by Christ. As 
interpreted by him, right implies moral liberty 
to pursue and possess under certain pre- 
scribed limitations everything that makes 
for the attainment of happiness and the ful- 
fillment of function and destiny. It has been 
so from the beginning. 

These principles are in accordance with 
the laws of God. Where they have obtained, 
civilization has evolved. Reason and expe- 
rience are united in evidence that private 
property is not " a social inconvenience " — 
does not represent a spoliation of mankind. 
It is held, in all enlightened countries, under 
just limitations defined by law. Its posses- 
sion does not imply unlimited license in its 
use and abuse. So much for the morality of 
the property-right 



250 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES 

But there is a nobler side to its possession 
and exercise by Christian men and women, 
who regard themselves as stewards of the 
Lord's goods, at liberty to dispose of them 
only in the interest of the Divine Donor. 
Such was the interpretation placed upon the 
possession of property by the early Christian 
fathers, who do not deny the right while re- 
stricting it. Said St. Augustine : " Let him 
who is unwilling to share his goods with the 
poor understand that when he hears exhor- 
tations to show kindness, God is not com- 
manding him to give what is his own, but 
rather to give up that which is God's." 

Some communists, in harmony with the 
teachings of Plato's Republic, interpret 
monogamy as the exclusive possession by 
one man of a piece of property, and hence 
justify community of wives as well as com- 
munity of chattels, attacking marriage and 
advocating free-love. The so-called " com- 
plex " marriage of the Oneida Perfectionists 
really implies this. Schaffle admits the ex- 
istence among Socialists in general of loose 
views regarding marriage and family life. 
Not only are the several kinds of property 
common, but the persons of women among 
the members of a community ; and he seeks 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 251 

to apologize for this state of affairs by at- 
tempting to show that even among the well- 
to-do and educated classes free-love is the- 
oretically, if not practically as widespread as 
free religion ! If this were true, there is no 
argument in it. Morality and Christianity 
have ever declared for monogamy and indis- 
soluble marriage, have ever deprecated 
plural and adulterous unions. In the social 
system of Jesus, conjugal faithfulness is indel- 
ibly intaglioed. Nowhere in the Gospel nar- 
rative, thank God, is there the slighest trace 
of the communistic principle that the hus- 
band has a property right in his wife. Jesus 
Christ proclaimed the equality of the sexes, 
the sacredness and indissolubility of mar- 
riage—nay, read the God-detested sin in a 
single licentious glance. And Jesus, the in- 
carnate God, whose heart bled for the peni- 
tent harlot, in every breath, in every attitude, 
in the enunciation of every social principle, 
forever figures as the uncompromising foe of 
divorce and prostitution. 

Finally listen to the following words of the 
German incendiary in his " Quintessence of 
Socialism," regarding the Christian religion : 
" Socialism of the present day is out and out 
irreligious and hostile to the Church. It 



252 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES 

says that the Church is only a police institu- 
tion for upholding Capital, and that it de- 
ceives the common people with a check 
payable in heaven ! Hence the Church de- 
serves to perish." There is no mistaken 
tone to this avowal. The Church declares 
expressly, What a man sows that shall he 
(the individual, the private person) reap. Its 
founder urged men to lay up treasures where 
moth and dust do not corrupt, and pro- 
nounced those eternally blessed who hold a 
certified check in payment for deeds done 
in the flesh to present, if you will, at the 
great Banking House beyond the skies. 
Happy indeed are the holders of these spir- 
itual Christ-indorsed certificates. The So- 
cialism of to-day either contemplates the 
overthrow of all religion in its denial of the 
existence of a God, or else it consigns reli- 
gious questions to the Coventry of private 
concern. 

There must be ever an irreconcilable an- 
tagonism between the irreligious and sensual 
influences of Socialism and the spiritualizing 
tendencies of Christianity — between a system 
that is instigating the masses who have no 
laid-up capital, to throw off all authority 
both of church and state, and seize the prop- 






OF CHRISTIANITY. 253 

erty of the rich with the five billions of 
dollars deposited in the banks and the loan 
and trust institutions of the country, repre- 
senting the proceeds of honest labor in a 
thousand different lines ; that laughs to scorn 
sexual purity ; that encourages the grossest 
license, appeals to the baser passions of men, 
and bids for the patronage of lawbreakers ; 
that finds its national god in unbridled pleas- 
ure at once the destroyer of the body and 
the deadly dwale of the soul — between such 
a system, and a religion that enjoins respect 
for the powers that be, that declares the in- 
violability of property, the sacredness of mar- 
riage, and the law of moderation. 

Where Socialism has been tried, it has 
failed. Guaranteed physical support has not 
been accepted as a satisfactory compensa- 
tion for the surrender of individual liberty. 
It is not true that the best work of the world 
has been done by communistic institutions 
as Dr. Herron contends in his book entitled 
" Between Caesar and Jesus." The history 
of human development is the history of so 
many advances in civilization conceived and 
executed by individuals — from Junius Brutus 
who overturned the regal government at 
Rome, from the heroes of Marathon and 



254 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES 

Thermopylae, from Alexander of Macedon 
who paved the way for the spread of Christ's 
Gospel in the Orient, to Constantine and 
Charles Martel and Peter the Hermit, to 
Alfred of England and Edward III., to 
Wickliffe and Luther and Calvin and Wil- 
liam of Orange and Henry of Navarre, to 
Wesley and Whitefield, to Washington and 
Lincoln. What had socialistic influences to 
do with the inspiration of the men whom 
God selected to plan and consummate the 
mighty reforms of the world? This very 
point is conceded by Dr. Herron in the 
crowning contradiction of his chapter on 
Private Property. " I sometimes think," he 
says, " that a single man of great economic 
power, with the heart of Christ in him, could 
change the world," as if Christ himself had 
not already enacted the part of that single 
Man and completely changed the nature of 
this world. 

I repeat that Socialism so far as tried, has 
proved a failure. The Shakers, who are So- 
cialists, and teach, in addition to the commu- 
nity of property, the doctrine of celibacy and 
the duality of Christ — a male and female 
principle, an eternal Mother — have dwindled 
during the last fifty years to two thousand 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 255 

souls. The Oneida Perfectionists have 
lapsed into the Oneida Company Limited, 
each member having a separate interest rep- 
resented by shares of stock. So experi- 
mental Communism is dying everywhere, and 
is only popular among laboring men whose 
object is to see how little return they can 
make for their wages. Its universal real- 
ization would mean progress obstructed, 
inspiration shackled, laziness enthroned, in- 
differentism dominant, relapse to savagery 
assured. It would be synchronous with the 
advent of non-religion ; and in the accom- 
plishment of the evolution pictured by its 
abettors — in which " as slavery was suc- 
ceeded by feudalism, and feudalism was dis- 
placed by capitalism, so capitalism is now to 
be superseded by socialism," half the inhabit- 
ants of the earth and all perishable prop- 
erty would be destroyed. 

It has been argued in some quarters as 
already intimated, that the Bible indorses 
Communism ; and thoughtless Christians are 
won through such misrepresentation. As 
Socialism is non-Christian so is Christianity 
non-socialistic ; and those who talk of Chris- 
tian Socialism are compounding non-compati- 
bles. The axiom of Christian morality is — 



256 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES 

Every man has a right to himself; that of 
Socialism, No man has a right to himself — 
to his liberty, or his property, or his char- 
acter, or his happiness, or his reputation- 
Society owns him, body and soul — intellect, 
will, and conscience. He is without personal 
rights and personal responsibilities. Hegel's 
rule for all moral and social relations finds 
no application here : Be a person and re- 
spect the personality of others. Personality 
counts for nothing in Socialism, whose aim 
is so clearly the enslavement of society, not 
its manumission. Beneath its cloak of al- 
truism, glitters the murderer's dagger and 
smokes the incendiary's torch. 

I have said that Christianity is non-social- 
istic. Technical collectivism was no part of 
early Christian philosophy. While represent- 
ing the practical application of his religion 
to consist in social service, Jesus nowhere 
commanded or even advised his disciples to 
pool their earnings or turn over their prop- 
erty into a common fund or stock. They 
were not forbidden to have conflicting inter- 
ests, nor to engage in business competition 
in an open-handed manly way. We read that 
early Christians had all things in common, 
but this does not mean that they resigned 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 257 

individual interests in their property. If so, 
they could not subsequently have disbursed 
the products of its sale to their poorer breth- 
ren as we are told they did. Had their 
-property been fused in a communistic reserve, 
there would have been nothing to dispose of 
by private sale, no buyers, and no poor to re- 
lieve. Individual generosity and poverty are 
alike impossible under a perfect social sys- 
tem. It was the practice, however, of primi- 
tive Christians to make periodical distribu- 
tions among such as were in need ; and when 
you remember that a boycott was enforced 
against all who joined the early Church, and 
that they were cut off thereby from support, 
sympathy, and even employment, you will 
realize that the occasions for such charity 
were frequent and pressing. Ananias was 
not condemned for withholding his posses- 
sions, but for robbing God. Peter settled this 
question for all time in the searching inter- 
rogatories, " While it remained was it not 
thine own ? And after it was sold, was it 
not in thine own power ?" The sin of Ana- 
nias and Sapphira lay in prostituting the 
holy almonership which they had assumed of 
their own free will to the love of compli- 
ment. They forged God's name to secure 

17 



258 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES 

credit with men. It were needless to multi- 
ply instances of the retention of private 
property by early converts, of interests in 
real and personal estate by the original apos- 
tles themselves and by their Christian rela- 
tives and friends ; or to show that alms-giv- 
ing in the early centuries of our era was a 
voluntary expression of Christian love, and 
not required authoritatively by the Church. 
There was no disposition to force the rich 
and talented to use their superior endow- 
ments in the service of their fellow-men — a 
course which would have been contrary to 
all ideas of human rights ; which would have 
taken away man's free agency, and with it all 
individual motives and all credit for action ; 
which would have cauterized the conscience 
by transferring all responsibility to the com- 
mune, and have reduced the image of God 
in man to the psyche of the brute. The test 
of a man's faith in Christ was the love of 
that man for his brother. In illustration, I 
quote from Justin Martyrs first and princi- 
pal Apology (A. D. 138) : " And the wealthy 
among us Christians help the needy (there 
is no constraint except the love of Christ 
which prompts). And we always keep to- 
gether, and on the day called Sunday, those 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 259 

who live in cities gather in one place, and the 
Memoirs of the Apostles are read. And 
they who are well-to-do give what each 
thinks fit ; and what is collected is deposited 
with the President who succors the orphans 
and widows, and those who are in want or 
bonds, and the strangers sojourning among 
us " — mark, not grudgingly or of necessity, 
God loves a cheerful giver. What a beauti- 
ful picture of charitable contribution in the 
early Church ! Primitive Christians regarded 
their property as held in trust for the Lord s 
service, and w T ere always ready for any claims 
which that service made. It was not their 
own, nor society's : it was God's. From the 
Christian view-point, the argument of Dr. 
Herron that the owner of property is simply 
a steward having in trust what belongs to 
others, is extremely vulnerable. Christianity 
insists that he holds in trust what belongs 
to God, who gave it to him and requires him 
to administer it for the highest good of his 
fellow-men — and sometimes he consults this 
highest good by refusal to share it with them. 
I hold my possessions as the vicegerent of 
the Almighty. But at the same time I am a 
free and responsible agent, and therefore I 
exercise my own judgment as to how I shall 



260 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES 

use and bestow my wealth. God judges me 
by my motives. Such is and always has 
been the Christian doctrine of property. 

The Christian conception of man is that of 
a social being who fulfills his terrestrial des- 
tiny only by building his life into the lives 
of others. The duties of this complete 
Christian life are expressed in the require- 
ments of common charity, the true spirit of 
which is thus revealed by Christ himself: 
" Then shall the King say unto them on his 
right hand : Come, ye blessed of my Father, 
inherit the kingdom prepared for you from 
the foundation of the world. For I was an 
hungred and ye gave me meat : I was 
thirsty and ye gave me drink; I was a stran- 
ger and ye took me in ; naked and ye clothed 
me. I was sick and ye visited me ; I was in 
prison and ye came unto me. Then shall the 
righteous answer him, saying, Lord, when 
saw we thee an hungred and fed thee, or 
thirsty and gave thee drink ? When saw we 
thee a stranger and took thee in ? or naked 
and clothed thee ? Or when saw we thee 
sick or in prison and came unto thee? And 
the King shall answer and say unto them, 
Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have 
done it unto one of the least of these my 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 261 

brethren, ye have done it unto me." (Matthew 
xxv. 34.) Such ministration implies the pos- 
session of private property and the power to 
use it at will. 

Failure to accept the social service desig- 
nated in this enumeration is equivalent to 
betrayal of the God-assigned trust, and synon- 
ymous with unfitness for participation in the 
enjoyment of the future social life of Christ's 
kingdom. 

The Utopia of Jesus is not beyond human 
attainment because of the spiritual element 
in his Socialism, which embodies the energy 
adapted to the transfiguration of the universe. 
It is to be remembered that the forces which 
are capable of molding and perfecting human 
society are moral and spiritual, not of the 
earth, earthy. Character is the most power- 
ful social efficiency. Dauntless courage, 
manly resignation, self-control, suffering for 
others, suffering for truth's sake, inflexible 
loyalty to Christian principle, — are the real 
instruments of permanent social betterment. 
Love, from which all compulsion is elimi- 
nated, is the perfect law of Christ and holds 
all other virtues. The true reform of society 
can result only from the indwelling of this 
love in the hearts of men ; and a government 



262 EVIDENCES OF CHRISTIANITY. 

is Christlike, or Christian if you prefer— not 
because it is monarchical, democratic, or 
communistic — but because, to quote the 
words of Professor Shailer Mathews,* it is 
" honestly seeking to realize the principles of 
brotherly love on which are based the social 
teachings of our Saviour." It is only by the 
adoption of the divine ideals unfolded by Je- 
sus Christ as the regulators of human inter- 
course, — the recognition of that charity which 
fulfills the whole Gospel law as the main- 
spring of social progress, that we can hope to 
realize in this world that civic harmony and 
that social peace which are a true foretaste 
of Heaven. 

* " The Social Teachings of Jesus." 



What is Christianity More than Altruism, or Socio- 
Commercial Love? 

(We have a little sister, and she hath no breasts. 
Song of Solomon, viii. 8.) 

Said Rose Cleveland: "Altruistic faith is 
a faith in human nature's intrinsic worth : a 
faith that the race is gravitating toward a 
goal of final good, rather than of final evil : 
a faith that humanity is persistently electing 
itself to honor, glory, and immortality, by a 
majority : a faith which declares life worth the 
living; a faith which looks into poorhouses, 
asylums, and penitentiaries, and still believes 
in humanity reclaimable and infinitely worth 
saving." 

We could wish that Rose Cleveland had 
added : And this faith is born only of a 
grander and inconceivably higher, and all- 
inclusive faith — a faith in the guiding hand, 
the infallible wisdom, and the eternal love of 
the God of destiny. What Miss Cleveland 
describes so eloquently are wild fruits rip- 
ened by the sunshine of Christian love on 
the borders of its great harvest-fields — fruits 
that have stolen their nurture from the crop 



264 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES 

of the Perfect Altruist. What she calls Al- 
truism is conditioned by Christianity. It is 
the little sister with shriveled affections, 
biased judgment, and mere terrestrial aim — 
the mincing miss at the skirts of the divine 
Almoner, whose breasts are like towers. The 
nobler sister teaches that something must pre- 
cede true benevolence, must underlie genuine 
self-sacrifice, self-forgetfulness, suffering for 
fellow-beings, devotion to man; and that some- 
thing is the mother grace of which all others 
are begotten in the soul — Faith in Jesus 
Christ as the Son of God. The love that is the 
child of this faith is the love that many 
waters cannot quench, the love which is the 
supreme good, the love which shall perdure 
to witness Faith itself dissolve in realization 
and Hope shade into fruition, while it goes 
on forever — the love that constitutes the 
absolute essence of the personal, self-con- 
scious Jehovah. 

" There is no good of life but love ; 

What else looks good, is some shade flung from love. 

Love gilds it." 

Such a shade is Altruism, the opposite of 
Egoism in the nomenclature of Philosophy. 
The word is of Italian origin and means lit- 
erally otherness, other-self, or love of others. 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 265 

It was coined by the philosopher Auguste 
Comte to convey the idea quite nearly ex- 
pressed by unselfishness, devotion to hu- 
manity, true disinterestedness. Around this 
notion cluster many theories of life, notably 
the socialistic dream that with the coming 
of equal facilities for maintenance and recre- 
ation — the abolition of the interdependence 
of private individuals by laws enforcing the 
nationalization of land and capital and the 
equalization of labor — discontent will vanish, 
and with it crime. Altruism is thus sup- 
posed to secure the greatest happiness to 
the greatest number. Collectivists, Fou- 
rierists, Tolstoiists — all pretenders to spe- 
cialism in the profession of self-sacrifice — are 
demanding that property shall be spontane- 
ously given up for the common good, and 
threatening an uprising of the people for the 
purpose of seizing and redistributing what 
they designate as unearned and unjustified 
wealth. This is the way in which Altruists 
love their neighbors as themselves. They 
would better throw off their masks and appear 
as the Nihilists that they are. 

As a religion, such Altruism involves, 
along with Socialism, a worship of the State, 
the taskmistress, the recognized owner of 



266 



ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES 



labor and its products ; and involving such 
worship, while proclaiming universal free- 
dom, it really aims at establishing universal 
servitude. 

Evolutional Altruism, as taught by the 
philosophers of the Herbert Spencer school, 
declares that " there is a certain law of na- 
ture which compels and governs the conduct 
of human society in such a way that ulti- 
mately each individual who composes it will 
realize that the reason of his existence in 
this world is not for himself but for society, 
and that he must conduct himself accord- 
ingly." But was not this law of nature, as 
discovered in both Old and New Testa- 
ment, coetaneous with man, and was it not 
realized in the code of the ancient Hebrews 
and in Christ's religion of self-sacrifice that 
bids us do unto others — all others — as we 
would have others do unto us ? The recog- 
nition by the early Church of the claims of 
humanity as superior to the claims of the in- 
dividual or the claims of any society of indi- 
viduals, has been dwelt upon in a previous 
address. But these Evolutionists talk as if 
abstract Altruism were a conception of their 
own, a climax to be reached by successive 
gradations of sympathetic activity ; whereas 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 267 

every reader of history and every student of 
sociology is abundantly aware that it was 
idealized and perfectly realized in the life of 
Jesus Christ, and through him has asserted 
itself in that of every consistent Christian. 
Infidels are declaring that in nineteen cen- 
turies there has been but one Jesus, yet the 
world remains the same old world. The 
falsehood of this assertion is pervious to the 
most indifferent analysis. The world has 
been transfigured by the Altruism of Christ ; 
and modern civilization indisputably owes 
its evolution to Christianity, the greatest 
truth and love disseminating force this earth 
has ever known. Evolutional Altruism has 
adopted for its God what is best in mans 
nature, and worships the Being of Hu- 
manity. It knows no over-soul, regards man 
as wholly sufficient unto himself, and finds 
its inspiration entirely in human ideals. It 
sprung from the Positivism of Comte, who 
sought to eliminate the divine alike from as- 
piration and inspiration. Thus stripped of 
the supranatural element, Altruism, a fad of 
the decade, has gravitated to the low level 
of the temporal and the sordid. It is with- 
out spiritual attribute, and hence no longer 
expresses the highest quality of love, but 



268 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES 

rather the purely business side which expects 
more than it gives in the way of material 
return. The Altruism of to-day makes love 
a profession. It has degenerated into a 
worldly socio-commercial philosophy, which 
demands that everybody should make sacri- 
fices for us, but that we need make sacri- 
fices for nobody. It has been said that " the 
power to appreciate others in terms of self 
marks man off from the brute/' So the will 
deliberately to treat others in terms of self 
is the fundamental and inevitable outcome 
of Christian belief, and marks the genuine 
Christian off from the mere Altruist or pre- 
tender. 

The precept of the Bible is " Thou shalt 
love thy neighbor as thyself" — not better 
than thyself as some neighbors expect, but 
as thyself; that is, we are required as Chris- 
tians to exercise our faculties and gratify 
our lawful desires in such a manner as not to 
interfere with the right of other human be- 
ings to enjoy unmolested and unhampered 
the means of happiness God has conferred 
on them. And further, we are under obli- 
gation, if we live up to the full spirit of the 
injunction, to resent any invasion of our 
neighbor's rights even as of our own. This 






OF CHRISTIANITY. 269 

moral principle alone justified our war with 
Spain, to end her career of heart-sickening 
oppression, of torture, ravishment, and 
murder, in the realm of our nearest neighbor, 
the Queen of the Antilles. 

In Terence's master drama, " The Self- 
Tormentor," Chremes, one of the characters, 
makes the following reply to the question of 
a neighboring country gentleman as to how 
he found time to pry into other people's af- 
fairs : " I am a man, and I have an interest in 
everything that concerns humanity " — a senti- 
ment worthy of a Christian, on hearing which 
the Roman audience shook the theater with 
their applause — " I am a man, and hence have 
an interest in everything that concerns hu- 
manity." The command given in the seventh 
chapter of St. Matthew, " All things whatso- 
ever ye would that men should do unto you, 
do ye even so to them," equivalents a re- 
quirement to estimate the rights of others 
by the consciousness in our own bosoms of 
the possession of exactly the same rights. 
Hence Christianity requires us to be as care- 
ful of our neighbor's life and property as of 
our own, of his reputation as of our own, of 
his character as of our own. This is to be 
thoroughly unselfish, genuinely disinterested. 



270 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES 

I have yet to meet with a mere Altruist 
intolerant of criminal carelessness, the most 
prolific cause of death. Christian love alone 
is ever alert against murder potential. Chris- 
tianity alone condemns the adulterators of 
medicines and food-stuffs, the retailers of dis- 
eased meat and depleted bacteria-ridden 
milk, the dealers who sell rum to bloated 
drunkards with the death stamp on every 
feature ; the man who deliberately by the use 
of morphine, absinthe, cocaine, alcohol, or 
any other brain-stealer, puts himself into a 
position in which he is likely to injure his 
neighbors. Christianity alone rebukes the 
nurse who neglects the patient placed under 
her care ; the patient who disregards the 
directions of a scientific physician with fatal 
consequences ; the doctor who, ignorant of 
the malady he is treating, goes on trying this 
remedy and that until death puts an end to 
his experiments. 

Christianity arraigns the individual or 
company that carelessly permits access to 
danger of any kind — to live electric wire, to 
stored dynamite or other explosive, to deadly 
drugs, to road or bridge out of repair, to 
steamboat or railroad train under circum- 
stances of questionable safety. Christianity 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 271 

denounces as a crime the spreading of conta- 
gious or communicable diseases through 
thoughtlessness or willful defiance of sanitary 
law, and places him who omits or refuses to 
observe proper precautions on a par with the 
common cutthroat. " Murder," says Presi- 
dent Hyde of Bowdoin College, " is more 
common in the United States to-day than 
when the Indians roamed the wilderness 
with tomahawk and scalping-knife. Every 
death that comes prematurely through de- 
fective sanitation, over-strain, anxiety, un- 
kindness, sorrow, neglect, betrayal, discour- 
agement — in so far as those conditions were 
removable — is practically a case of murder. 
And the landlord, the employer, the father, 
the husband, the son, the merchant, the 
neighbor, who might have relieved or re- 
moved the unhealthful physical, nervous, 
mental, or emotional conditions, and failed to 
do so, is a murderer/' Again, I ask, does 
selfish Altruism take this high ground ? 

Christianity holds that he who covets his 
brother's goods is a thief at heart ; while 
socialistic Altruism clamors for confiscation 
and redistribution of property. Under the 
Christian law of obligation to care for one's 
neighbors property as for one's own, the cat- 



272 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES 

egory of dishonest transactions includes the 
presentation of all wrongful motives to influ- 
ence presumable buyers ; appeal to vanity, 
jealousy, or ignorance; disparagement of prop- 
erty in the hope of securing it at a re- 
duced price ; exaggeration of the value of 
articles on sale ; concealment of rise in value, 
which is so much robbery of a seller; extor- 
tion by employers of services for which they 
do not pay ; neglect of work for which com- 
pensation is received ; theft of time ; theft 
of mental peace ; acceptance of bribes, which 
is direct theft from justice, a cold-blooded 
steal from one's constituents. I have yet to 
see a non-Christian Altruist who is superior 
to all these methods of infringing on his 
neighbor's property rights. 

Reputation is what others think of us. It 
is as much property as bonds and real estate. 
Hence to subtract from it in any way is theft 
— as great a violation of justice as marketing 
worthless certificates of stock. Does calcu- 
lating Altruism go as far as this ? Did you 
ever hear of its forbidding dissection of per- 
sonal character in the farm-kitchen, in the 
factory, the workshop, or in the boudoirs of 
heartless society women. Socialistic Altruists 
are urging the people to lay violent hands on 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 273 

the material property of their neighbors. 
Think you they stop at the property rights 
in reputation ? 

And did you ever consider what neighbor 
it is that usually furnishes a theme for the 
tongues that are set on fire of Hell? It is 
woman — " blest partner of our joys and woes, 
angel of comfort to the failing soul " — woman, 
who mayhap has passed through fiery suffer- 
ing to show us what a woman true may be 
— woman, calm and holy, that " sitteth by the 
fireside of the heart, feeding its flames." The 
brightest star that blazes in the constellation 
of American principles is a deference for 
woman unparalleled in the history of man- 
kind ; and yet there is a legion of American 
detractors, agitators of Socialism and Altru- 
istic reforms, who are wont to speak of every 
woman either as impure or as possessing a 
virtue that is assailable. They see in every 
honorable wife a specious bosom-cheat. They 
read impurity on the sunken cheeks behind 
the widow's veil. They ridicule with profli- 
gate sneer " the rose which, withering on the 
virgin thorn, grows, lives, and dies in single 
blessedness." And they even find in pure 
and simple maidenhood a mark for their 
venomed daggers. Their carnal propensity 



274 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES 

would hardly feel itself rebuffed by the sweet 
dignity of an Evangeline, as, with the sacra- 
ment still upon her lips, 

" Homeward serenely she walked with God's benediction upon 

her; 
When she had passed, it seemed like the ceasing of exquisite 

music." 

Behold ! the reputation thief is on her trail, 
eager to assault that chastity of honor which 
Burke said feels a stain like a wound ! 

And what says Altruism of those whose 
ears itch for the tales that are intended to 
blast reputations — the moral soil-pipes that 
collect and carry off contemptible, false, filthy 
reports of men and women to foul the clear- 
running streams of social life? Christianity 
makes the ready listener a partaker in the 
guilt of the scandal-carrier. It is your fault 
if you accept all the evil you hear of your 
neighbors. The highest Christian culture is 
to think no ill, to speak no ill, to listen to no 
ill. Charity rejoiceth not in iniquity. A 
writer of poetic mind once said : " If, instead 
of a gem or a flower, we could cast the gift 
of a lovely thought into the heart of a friend, 
that would be giving as the angels give." 
How strong the contrast here — the gift of a 
lovely thought to the malicious merciless 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 275 

calumny of socialistic agitators. For how 
many noble thoughts has the sensational Al- 
truist made you a debtor ? 

I find your so-called Altruist everywhere 
depraving character, teaching unscriptural 
views regarding marriage and chastity, flaunt- 
ing the free-love banner, scattering the fire- 
brands of discontent, nursing malignant pas- 
sions, proclaiming the right to steal, denying 
the immanence of God. But Christianity, 
armed with the prohibition, Thou shalt not 
deprave, absolutely forbids the weakening or 
undermining of moral restraints by all wicked 
example and teaching, by all toleration of im- 
moral word or action, by appeal to evil dis- 
positions and perverted imaginations, by 
ministration to the base appetites of men. 
When we Christians contemplate the force 
of example and silent influence — when we 
consider how easy it is, by tone, or word, or 
song, or look, or gesture, or shrug of shoul- 
der, or exhibition of picture — to take from 
the purity of a character — and when we 
realize that God holds us responsible for the 
slightest shadow we may cast upon the white- 
ness of innocence, we must indeed measure 
our words and gauge our actions with fear 
and trembling. Do the apostles of socio- 



276 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES 

commercial love go to this length ? Ah ! no, 
for popular Altruism does not imply moral 
quality. Popular Altruism, in justification of 
the sinful lives of its supporters, explains all 
virtue as due to the insufficiency of tempta- 
tion. 

Christianity loves the better self, the image 
divine, even in the criminal and the outcast. 
However obscure, however distorted, it is the 
lofty purpose of Christian Altruism to give 
definition to this image ; and we well know 
that as the image of the intellectual and the 
ethical Divine assumes its clear and beautiful 
proportions, all sensual thought-forms are 
forced out of focus. Altruism is not particu- 
larly concerned with effort to remove hered- 
itary or acquired sin. With the one, it is 
the refuse heap for the castaway ; with the 
other, it is the lapidary wheel for cutting and 
polishing the blemished gem. How dwelleth 
the love of God in the heart of the woman 
Altruist who thrusts from her an erring sister 
or the girl against whom even a slanderous 
whisper has been heard, yet welcomes to her 
drawing-room the notorious libertine who 
openly makes merchandise of her sex ? Think 
you that the Almighty makes any distinction 
between the man and the woman guilty of 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 277 

infraction of his seventh command? I am 
sure there is no such good society in Heaven ; 
good society, which condones debauchery in 
the man, but drives into a life of shame, and 
a death of agony, and a future of what ? his 
confiding victim ; good society, which curtsies 
to the gold of divorced adulterers and adul- 
teresses who look upon marriage as a stu- 
pendous joke. Do you realize that there are 
in the Borough of Manhattan fifty thousand 
registered prostitutes, known to the police, 
and fifty thousand more private mistresses 
who ply their vocation clandestinely, the 
greater part of them the victims of seduc- 
tion? And do you know that ninety per 
cent of these women unwillingly lead the life 
they do ? That there is no alternative for 
them with this career of sin ? Good society, 
Christian society, has pushed them out to be 
the scorn of a hissing world. No name in 
Hell's dark catalogue too black to brand them 
with. My God ! what frightful responsibility 
rests upon the men who have sullied and 
blighted young souls once 

" Bright and pure 
As a fresh opening lilac when it spreads 
Its clear leaves to the sweetest dawn of May." 

My God ! what responsibility attaches to 



278 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES 

your good society, your Altruistic society, in 
that it has done nothing to dry the tears that 
wash out sin but cannot wash out shame — 
in that it unblushingly countenances pro- 
cedures that force into harlotry the unfortu- 
nate daughters of toil. 

Ah! how glaringly deficient in the principle 
of doing it as unto God is the Christianity of 
the day ! Your good society, your Christian 
society, stands by untouched in the presence 
of human misery and degradation — phlegmati- 
cally beholds the confiding plundered by 
ruthless speculators, and the poor in tatters 
and nakedness, and men rendered bestial by 
drink, and girls forced to dishonor by star- 
vation wages, and jeweled patrons of the 
bargain-counters literally trafficking in the 
blood and virtue of woman. Ah ! how true 
it is that what goes by the name of Chris- 
tianity is not Christianity. Christianity is 
not so cowardly as ever to ask, Is it safe? 
Christianity is not so politic as to inquire, Is 
it expedient ? Christianity is not so servile 
as to question, Is it popular? Christianity 
is not so economical as to query, Will it pay ? 
Christianity only asks, Is it right ? Right to 
give to my suffering brother of the abundance 
God has given to me ? Right to unbend to 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 279 

the disreputable ? Right to speak kindly to 
a fallen woman in hope to make her clean ? 
Right to exhibit to her the serene beauty of 
a holy life ? Right to admit her to converse 
with those women whose spirits walk abreast 
of angels ? Right, as Frances Willard cried, 
" to place all women in circumstances of such 
independence that they shall not be tempted 
to make merchandise of those attributes of 
their being which are the most sacred to God 
and humanity ? " There must be heart as well 
as head in religion. Does supercilious Al- 
truism take these things seriously to heart? 

The times are asking with startling empha- 
sis, Is there nothing your Saviour wants you 
to do that you are leaving undone to day ? 
Is there no perverted imagination mocked by 
the phantoms of anticipated indulgence that 
you can win from debasing pleasures and lift 
to commerce with the skies? Is there no 
homeless girl who has learned too late that 
men betray, and on whose ear is harshly fall- 
ing the relentless doom of society, " Unclean 
and outcast ! " to whom you can be brave 
enough to say, " Sister in Christ, /do not con- 
demn thee ? " 

Is there no fallen woman pressing her 
bleeding heart and beating her weary head 



2 8o ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES 

against the pitiless barriers an unchristian 
community has built up around her, to whom 
you can extend a sympathetic hand and help 
her over the chevaux-de-frise that bar her 
from communion with the good ? Do you 
happen to live in a neighborhood 

" Where every woe a tear can claim, 
Except an erring sister's shame ? " 

If so, you have work to do for your Saviour. 
Up, and be doing it ! The disposition to 
give the cup of cooling water here is more 
acceptable to Him than whole burnt offerings 
and sacrifices. For inasmuch as ye have 
done it unto one of the least and one of the 
worst of these his betrayed or misguided sis- 
ters, ye have done it unto Him, 

Once more, Altruism enjoins service with- 
out regard to motives, fitness,or consequences. 
Christianity, on the other hand, uses common 
sense in its benevolence, and is inspired by a 
regard for the highest good of its beneficia- 
ries. Whereas Jesus Christ gave no encour- 
agement to idlers, pickthanks, and beggars, 
the Altruistic reformer seeks to emphasize the 
permanent claim of poverty on the bounty of 
the State or mutual benefit organization, and 
thus puts machinery in operation to manufac- 
ture a stock of dependents and parasites. 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 281 

Christianity condemns all unwise and in- 
discriminate charity. The instinctive social 
propensity, on the contrary, prompts men to 
secure happiness for themselves by first ren- 
dering others happy. The deed of so-called 
charity may therefore proceed from no high 
moral motive or sense of duty, but simply be 
the expression of disinterested feeling. We 
have to recognize the difference between such 
emotional charity and that pure Christian 
love of ones fellow-beings that is based on a 
prayerful study of the philosophy of Jesus 
Christ — that sends men forth into the house 
of poverty and the bagnio of shame in obe- 
dience to the divine command; that ties the 
tongue of anger and even of reproach ; that 
puts instead kind words into the mouth, 
words of good will, words calculated to make 
men better; that charity whose voice re- 
sounds through the Gospel in the mandate, 
" Live truly for yourself by living consist- 
ently and discriminatingly for others." 

Such love is a stranger to the sympathy 
with one's self which is so characteristic of 
Altruism. It does not condone the extrava- 
gances of charity. It fearlessly disparages 
merit in self-sacrifice pursued for itself alone, 
and proclaims the test of spiritual value to 



282 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES 

be, not the action, but the motive that 
prompts the action. It is in full accord with 
the Talmudic writer, that M the noblest char- 
ity is to prevent a man from accepting char- 
ity, and the best alms is to enable a man to 
dispense with alms." M Give, it is like God," 
said Tupper. But Christian Altruism amends 
this into u Give like God, and do no harm by 
your gift." It recognizes the fact that un- 
wise giving is not the cure for pauperism. It 
deprecates all suicidal sacrifice, the sacrifice 
of what is essential to an individual's own 
highest development for the supposed ad- 
vantage of some other individual. The only 
sacrifice that Christian Altruism counte- 
nances is a sacrifice not annihilatory of the 
true self, but extirpative of what is false and 
self-seeking in the self. Its devotion of life 
and service to the welfare of others is thus 
tempered with judgment. The self-sacrificing 
woman who, in the face of recent scientific 
conclusions to the effect that inebriates are 
sufferers from a transmissible disease rather 
than the slaves of a curable vice, deliberately 
marries a drunkard to reform him, thereby 
helps to perpetuate the evils she would cor- 
rect and is false to her own better self. Gen- 
erations to come have rights that Christians 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 283 

are under obligations to respect. We are 
indeed at liberty to risk life itself for the 
good of our fellow man, but a high-minded 
man or woman must hesitate to jeopard the 
health and happiness of a prospective family 
for the purpose of satisfying the longings 
even of the worthiest and purest affection. 

The mistaken efforts of Altruism are 
further manifested in the abuse of medical 
charity, which encourages thousands of per- 
sons who are abundantly able to pay for 
professional services, to throng our dispensa- 
ries and clinics. Thirty-nine per cent of the 
people of New York receive — or to call a 
spade a spade, in numerous cases steal — free 
treatment and free medicine from the public 
charities, the facilities in this line being 
amply sufficient for a population ten times 
as large as that of this city. The exagger- 
ated devotion of certain pious women to all 
kinds of charitable enterprises, whereby hus- 
band and family are neglected and nothing 
is left for the loved ones at home but head- 
aches and impatient *words, is but a phase 
of the same perversion. I have seen house- 
holds broken up and cruel separations take 
place because good wives forgot their su- 
preme duty. This is not as God designed it. 



284 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES 

I have seen nervous systems wrecked and 
mental dyssymmetry result from making a 
God of the imaginary demands of religion^ 
and pushing self-sacrifice to the verge ot 
idolatry ! How true those words of Phillips 
Brooks, " We must not be so full of the hope 
of Heaven that we cannot do our work on 
earth." And so the sentimentalists who fill 
the murderer s cell with costly bouquets, with 
gifts of cigars, wines, and delicatessen, and 
pledge an ostentatious funeral after execu- 
tion, but put a premium on the commission 
of crime. That inspired daughter of God, 
Mrs. Ballington Booth, has solved in a Chris- 
tian spirit, and by a life of devotion not con- 
spicuous for its neglect of home duties — the 
great problem of the reformation of the pris- 
oner for the protection of society. Christian 
love must have activities ; but these activities, 
like all other activities, have their limitations. 
Finally, modern Altruism discriminates 
in favor of the members of an order or so- 
ciety. It urges the personal advantage of 
membership in its fraternities, and seeks its 
own to the exclusion of outsiders. Christi- 
anity, on the other hand, enjoins universality 
in self-sacrificing activities. " As we have 
opportunity,'' counsels Paul, " let us do good 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 285 

unto all men," not merely to the members of 
a mutual benefit society, not because they 
are Odd Fellows, or Masons, or brethren 
of some philanthropic order, but because 
they are human beings. Under the Christian 
system, "All work for each, each works for 
all." " Everybody for me, I for nobody," is 
the conspicuous dogma of Altruism, or Busi- 
ness Love. 

A good friend who belongs to the Inde- 
pendent Order of Odd Fellows, in presenting 
the claims of his brotherhood to my respect- 
ful consideration, instanced a case in which 
an Odd Fellow was seriously hurt in the 
streets of a New England city, and thrown 
from his carriage upon the sidewalk in front 
of a pretentious hotel. As the bystanders 
were carrying the injured man into the cor- 
ridor, the proprietor dashed out, and with 
the words, " I will not have my hotel turned 
into a slaughter-house," ordered the bearers 
back into the street. But upon the manifes- 
tation of a secret sign by the swooning man, 
his demeanor instantly changed. He de- 
tected in the stranger a fellow of his order. 
" Carry him in," he cried, " nothing in my 
house is too good for that man." This inn- 
keeper was an exemplary Levite, but a bad 



286 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES 

Samaritan ! A consistent Christian would 
have said at the outset, " Nothing in my 
house is too good for that man," not because 
he is an Odd Fellow, but because he is my 
brother in Christ, and as a Christian I re- 
joice at every opportunity of this kind to serve 
my Saviour. Christ is my Noble Grand ! " 
Focus your eyes on the central sun, rather 
than on the planet that borrows its light 

Contrast with the incident just narrated 
the following from Ian Maclaren's " Potters' 
Wheel : " "A congregation made up of well- 
to-do and easy-going people whom the 
preacher has sought to move to the pity and 
service of their fellow-creatures is coming 
out of church. Just as they emerge, a run- 
away horse knocks down and tramples upon 
a young child. She is only a child of the 
city — nameless and not lovely — who has been 
in the park and was trudging home with a 
few buttercups in her hand. It does not 
matter. In such circumstances, Christian 
people do not criticise nor calculate. A 
little maid has been hurt, and her calamity 
conquers the heart. Men are instantly 
shaken out of their composure and rush to 
her aid. Women forget their finery and wipe 
away the blood. A whole company are of a 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 287 

sudden delivered from their selfishness and 
inspired with human interest. Every sin — 
pride, vanity, hardness, envy — is suspended ; 
every virtue — love, sacrifice, gentleness, hu- 
mility — is called into exercise. A crowd of 
ordinary people has been suddenly raised to 
practical sainthood by a stroke." There are 
distinct inspirations behind this Christian 
and that Odd Fellow exhibition of Altruism 
—a scented and a scentless rose. 

Most persons join altruistic societies for 
material gain, for the personal advantage 
they are led to believe will accrue to them- 
selves ; for selfish sweets of love, not for the 
good they may be instrumental in doing to 
others. Hence such societies tend to culti- 
vate self-interest, to the destruction of that 
godlike spirit in man which scorns admis- 
sion of weakness and dependence. I have 
been flatly told tnat I was in request for 
membership in a fraternity quite popular in 
New Hampshire on account of the money 
and service the brethren hoped to get out 
oi me. The words were, " We want to use 
you." I decided promptly that the highest 
use the brethren could make of me for their 
own good would be to continue independr 
ent of me. 



288 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES 

Another thing I have noticed is that men 
who accept membership in secret organiza- 
tions with social aims are apt to become in- 
different to their religious duties, often cease 
to attend divine service, interpret brotherly 
love in its most contracted application to a 
few favored think-the-sames, and practice 
charity in accordance with their own pinched 
whims. Such altruism is synonymous with 
narrow-hearted favoritism ; it is the foster- 
mother of hypocrisy. 

I do not mean to condemn all secret be- 
nevolent and social organizations, even with 
their tendency to the abuse of the mutual as- 
sistance theory, as well as to degeneration 
into mere convivial clubs ; but I do mean 
unhesitatingly to assert that they are all 
slack-salted when contrasted with Christi- 
anity — because of the immeasurably lower 
level of the source from which their altru- 
ism draws its energy. 

Christianity unmistakably teaches that it 
is not sacraments, nor ceremonies, nor secrets, 
nor priestly ministrations, nor moral char- 
acter, nor the whole synthesis of Christian 
graces, that saves a man ! but the one thing 
only God asks is living faith in Jesus Christ 
— the fountain of a higher devotion, a more 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 289 

exalted brotherly love, a divine Altruism. 
This is the root that disintegrates the soil of 
indifference and selfishness and sends life to 
the richest fruits of character. This was the 
one thing the young man lacked who had 
exhibited in so marked a degree the other 
qualities of a perfect intellect. 

I interpret the existence of altruistic socie- 
ties as equivalent to an admission that Christ 
is not enough ; for if Christ be all-sufficient, 
and all-satisfying, surely every one of them 
is superfluous. Their object as publicly de- 
clared, viz., " to visit the sick, relieve the 
distressed, bury the dead, educate the orphan, 
improve and elevate the character of man," 
has been the avowed object of Christianity 
for nineteen centuries, and has filled the 
world with benevolent institutions, and has 
given birth to multitudes of charitable or- 
ganizations whose members in the name of 
Christ extend a helping hand to every son 
and daughter of sorrow. It is far nobler to 
do this of one's own free will as unto Jesus, 
than to do it because of obligation to a secret 
society or philanthropic brotherhood — to do 
it, as we all have known many to do, grudg- 
ingly and of necessity. 

Thank God for the heroic men and self* 

19 



290 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES 

sacrificing women who gladly give up ease, 
wealth, social and professional distinction, to 
minister to their suffering, sorrowing, sin- 
burdened fellows — the wayward brothers of 
the street, the sisters of the mill and factory } 
the down-trodden mothers of the slums, the 
fatherless and widow dazed and distraught 
beside the new-filled grave. The incoming 
of Christ into their hearts has been accom- 
panied with the outgoing of personal ener- 
gies in the warfare against moral and physi- 
cal disease. Such altruism is inclusive ; it 
holds all others. All lesser lights, all coun- 
terfeits, imitations, and substitutes, pale in the 
luster of its divinity. 

Man is a social animal, and was not created 
to live alone. His normal state is one of 
quest for other personalities in sympathy 
with his interests, enthusiasms, and purposes; 
for other beings with souls of his soul, with 
whom he may mingle smiles and tears. It 
was a thought of the poets that angels 
gather from such friendship half their joy. 
Can we find it in perfection on the earth ? 

You well remember these words of Christ : 
" For whosoever shall do the will of my 
Father which is in Heaven, the same is my 
brother, and sister, and mother. ,, (Matt. xii. 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 291 

50.) Here is the Altruist we cannot dis- 
pense with ; the Perfect Friend, constant in 
all things ; forgiving when slighted and even 
insulted ; pointing the lost way in life's darkest 
hour ; who companies the solitude of grief 
and shares the thrills of triumph ; whose 
whispered commendation is the greatest con- 
ceivable stimulus to human action, the one 
unchanging and inseparable Friend, of all 
things the most rare, the Image of eternity. 
Ah ! young man, when you have withstood 
banter and ridicule at the hands of your com- 
panions because you have insisted that 
neither your person nor your property shall 
be used as a means of grieving your God or 
defiling your neighbor — when you have made 
it plain that you are not afraid to play the 
consistent Christian — Brave boy ! Listen to 
the praise of your Saviour, whose will you 
have respected, My Brother. Is it not far 
sweeter than the approval of any altruistic 
committee or confederation ? Is it not more 
stimulating to lofty purpose and noble en- 
deavor? Does it not strengthen you in your 
resolve that there shall be no exceptions to 
your rule, no favorites for whom you will re- 
lax? And when your so-called friends fall 
away in consequence of your inflexible ad- 



292 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES 

herence to your convictions of duty, does it 
not empower you to be thankful, to be proud, 
that you are accounted worthy to suffer such 
a loss for the sake of your Christian prin- 
ciple ? 

And you, young maiden, who mayhap have 
denied yourself a consecrated home and shut 
your heart to a good man's love in order that 
you may act the mother to an orphaned 
household or smooth the declining years of 
an invalid parent, do you not know who is 
watching the pearl of your hopes dissolve in 
the acid of a cruel, yet sweetly unselfish de- 
votion, and in recognition of your service for- 
ever fills your loyal pathway with fragrance 
from heavenly censers? Even He who has 
proclaimed you his Sister, because without 
complaining, without questioning its justice, 
you have bent your fair head to his will. 

And you, mother, who have laid your sweet 
lambs in the earth, and you, wife, over whose 
chosen one the grass is growing — where turn 
you for the " faith that lifts, the courage that 
sustains?" Is it not even to that jesus who 
approves your womanly resignation to his 
decree, and whose hand seems to rest upon 
your arm, and whose " Peace, be still " brings 
a great calm to the troubled waters of your 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 293 

anguish? Is it not that Christ whose words 
are so articulate in your ears, My Mother? 
Is there any such Noble Grand in your mu- 
tual benefit societies ? Do you know of any 
Worshipful Master who is able to discern 
the hidden life or value at its true worth the 
sacrifice and awful struggle ? Do you dream 
of any consolation comparable to that the 
Redeemer offers you ? 

Mapla rj 'M.aydalrjvrj epxerat CKoriac en ovarjq — 

Mary came when it was dark. 

The presence of that forgiven woman il- 
lumined the dismal scene on which pivots 
the destiny of man, an empty sepulcher ! 
So, when all the heart-strings would pull the 
heart asunder, the love of Jesus passing the 
love of woman, will scatter the gloom of de- 
spair, and the light of his grace, polarized in 
its passage through the media of faith and 
resignation will fill the darkened soul with 
iris-hued comfort. And the sympathy and 
support of the Divine Altruist are to be had 
for the asking; the invitation supreme has 
never been revoked: " Come unto me, all ye 
that labor and are heavy laden, and I will 
give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, 
and learn of me ; for I am meek and lowly in 
heart : and ye shall find rest unto your souls. 11 



What is Christianity More than Agnosticism? 
Modern Doubt and Christian Conviction* 

(And he looked and said, There is nothing. 1 Kings xviii. 43.) 

During the ten preceding Sundays, it has 
been my privilege to talk with you upon the 
false faiths and strange gods that may be 
reckoned as dangerous foes to Christianity. 
To-day, we are to consider non-religion or 
Agnosticism, the fashionable unbelief which 
maintains that the existence of anything be- 
yond natural phenomena is unknown and un- 
knowable, accepting no conclusions that are 
not demonstrable by the procedures of ordi- 
nary logic ; which in consequence denies im- 
mortality and with it the existence of One 
Supreme Omniscient Being, the primal Cause 
of all life and the presiding Mind of the 
Universe, and substitutes for intelligent de- 
sign as an explanation of the things that are, 
adaptation to purpose by natural selection, 
that is, " by the gradual preservation of 
better and better adaptations and the killing 
off of worse and imperfect adaptations/' the 
survival of the fittest, under the law of nature. 
To instance from a Sunday lecture by the 
late Professor Clifford, an English infidel: "A 



EVIDENCES OF CHRISTIANITY. 295 

helper of men outside humanity, the Truth 
will not allow us to see. The dim and shad- 
owy outlines of the Superhuman Deity fade 
slowly away from before us ; and, as the mist 
of his presence floats aside, we perceive with 
greater and greater clearness the shape of a 
yet grander and nobler figure, of him who 
made all gods and shall unmake them. From 
the dim dawn of history and from the inmost 
depths of every soul, the face of our Father 
Man looks out upon us with the fire of eter- 
nal youth in his eyes, and says, 'Before Je- 
hovah was, I am ! ' Such is the message of 
recent infidel philosophy. 

Up-to-date Agnosticism, through the pen 
of Mr. Grant Allen in his " Evolution of the 
Idea of God," proclaims Deity to be an 
evolved and abstract conception of the 
human mind. The Jews carried about a 
tribal god, Jahweh or Jehovah, a stone object 
in a chest ; and this ancestral sacred stone at 
a later date became sublimated and ethereal- 
ized into the God of Christianity. Existing 
men are declared to be the descendants of 
people who have had religions for more 
than a million years, Christianity being a 
pure evolution. As we have no records 
older than 6,000 or 7,000 years, it is difficult 



2 9 6 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES 

to understand on what principle this author 
knows so much about religion a million 
years ago. If ancient literature and epig- 
raphy prove anything, they unquestionably 
prove a primitive monotheism, and establish 
the fact that the heathen religions as we 
know them to-day are the distorted images 
of a pure faith which was originally revealed 
to man. 

Mr. Allen informs us with an air of inso- 
lent nonchalance that Christianity confess- 
edly sets out in its development with the 
worship of a particular deified man, who, rev- 
erenced at first by a few fishermen, grew 
gradually into a divine personage. This but 
uncovers the author's falsehood or exposes 
his supreme ignorance of early Christianity; 
for the disciples and their immediate con- 
verts worshiped Jesus as their Lord and 
their God. Mr. Allen continues: " The 
Mother of God, the blessed Madonna, came 
to have a practical importance in Christian 
worship scarcely inferior to that enjoyed by 
the persons of the Trinity;" and he foists 
upon Christianity a host of minor dead men 
and women, bishops, priests, virgins, con- 
fessors, and the like, to prove that our re- 
ligion at once surrendered its monotheism. 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 297 

It were easy to penetrate the veneer of this 
sophism. Christians are neither saint-wor- 
shipers nor Mariolaters ! Five hundred and 
fifty miles of catacombs beneath the city of 
Rome, entombing six million Christian dead, 
give the lie to this infidel. These subterra- 
nean galleries contain the earliest Christian 
inscriptions and mural decorations full of 
sweet trust, of unchilled hope, amid the 
terrors of persecution, and everywhere inno- 
cent of all leaning to the idolatrous. Within 
her very bosom, incised in tile and marble 
forever, Rome is mothering damning evi- 
dence against these harlotries. The sepul. 
chers of apostles and martyrs cry out in an 
eternal protest. In these memorials of pure 
Christianity, there is not the slightest insin- 
uation of a belief in the efficacy of prayer to 
saints, or of worship of the Virgin as co- 
Mediatrix. In these solemn chambers, Christ 
is the cynosure, the Alpha and Omega, the 
all in all — " him first, him last, him midst, 
him without end." This was primitive 
Christianity. 

In the erethism of his craze to belittle re- 
ligious faith, Grant Allen endeavors to show 
that adoration of the dead is the central 
force in modern Christianity, and pronounces 



298 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES 

corpse-worship the protoplasm of all religion. 
But love for the dead, which Christianity ap- 
proves, is a very different thing from worship 
of the dead, which Christianity reprobates. 
Mr. Allen has constructed in his mind an 
effigy of Christianity, which he proceeds to 
demolish with the usual weapons of the infi- 
del. His book, a mixture of falsehood, Tar- 
tufism, and self-conceit, is dangerous only to 
the feeble-minded, or to those who have ac- 
cepted instruction from theological systems 
rather than from the pure and simple Word 
of God. 

Agnosticism derides the idea of a helper 
outside humanity, makes sport of the his- 
toric Christ, and blazons Jesus as "an alias 
of the sun-God or an embodiment of the 
vine-Spirit." Annie Besant, in a popular 
lecture, voices as follows the position of mod- 
ern infidelity : " The difficulty is not to 
prove that Christ was believed to be an his- 
torical personage after the fourth century, 
but to bridge over the years A. D. 1-300. 
You cannot carry the history of Christ and 
the history of the gospels over that terrible 
chasm of three centuries. I shall show how 
various myths floating about became crystal- 
lized around the figure of Jesus of Nazareth. 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 299 

I cannot admit the miraculous. That Jesus 
of the gospels is miraculous is a stumbling- 
block at the very outset. There are so 
many incarnate gods in history, and they all 
present the same birthmarks. They are al- 
ways born at such a remote period, or at 
some such an out-of-the-way place, that it is 
impossible to submit their claims to scientific 
investigation. Their births are always sur- 
rounded by prodigies ; they always work 
miracles when they grow up ; there is al- 
ways something mysterious in their deaths : 
they always ascend triumphant at last. I 
allege that Jesus is one of these mythic char- 
acters ! The essence of the spirit in which 
science meets the record of miracles is the 
spirit of Hume — that it is much more likely 
that men should be deceived than that our 
whole experience of nature should have been 
contradicted." 

In the several extracts I have brought to 
your attention, is succinctly expressed the 
attitude of the modern agnostic, viz. : No 
God, no design, no Christ, no miracles ; 
Nature a sort of linked succession of condi- 
tioning causes and conditioned effects run- 
ning itself through all eternity, under well- 
understood physical laws that govern matter 



300 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES 

and motion ; No First Personal Cause, no 
Lawgiver, no cause and effect Connecter ; 
Man the inventor of the gods ! As Aristotle 
said, " Too much of Nothing." 

Closing eye and ear to the hundred and 
one monstrosities that are masquerading as 
expositions of Christian belief, let us, — in the 
first instance, grasp the essential characteris- 
tics of the religion which agnosticism scoffs 
at. Christianity certainly is not so narrow 
as to brook confinement behind the bars of 
denomination or school ; positively not so 
bigoted as to enforce a claim to sovereignty 
through some particular interpretation of 
some musty document ; plainly not so child- 
ish as to fancy that a panacea for sin exists 
in ritual or dogma ; assuredly not so ungen- 
erous as to condemn those whose beliefs de- 
flect a degree from the perpendicular of one 
of its sects, nor on the other hand so roman- 
tic as to recognize in meretricious religions 
chaste sister faiths. But Christianity is broad 
and liberal and deep-hearted and withal dis- 
criminating. It regards the Church only as 
an instrumentality for our spiritual growth 
and education; and teaches through that 
Church the pure Gospel of Jesus Christ as 
preserved in the Memoirs of his Apostles — 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 301 

not an inferential gospel derived from inter- 
ested interpretations — never a conglomerate 
gospel made up of New Testament jewels 
and heterogeneous debris. Christianity when 
referred to in this discourse will be under- 
stood as the religion of the four gospels of 
Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, the origi- 
nal springs of historical orthodoxy. 

We are now in a better position to con- 
trast the conclusions of agnostic logic, in the 
first place, with the New Testament realiza- 
tion of a God, at once transcendent, majesti- 
cally enthroned beyond the skies, and im- 
manent, an indweller in the universe, and its 
phenomena, but not identical therewith. 
Christianity finds this God everywhere, in 
everything, and reads in the universe a vol- 
ume which proclaims intelligent purpose 
from its every page. It is in agreement with 
the teachings of science, that there exists be- 
tween every organism and its surroundings a 
certain congruity or accord ; but it asserts 
that this congruity is an evidence of divine 
forethought, intention, provision. Such con- 
gruity alone explains in a rational manner our 
pleasure when we contemplate the structure 
of the human hand, and see with what nicety 
its many parts are adjusted to form a mem- 



3 o2 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES 

ber unequaled in strength, flexibility, and 
usefulness. It alone makes intelligible the 
astonishing adaptation to vision conditions 
of the emmetropic eye, the only perfect opti- 
cal instrument, the transformer of radiant 
energy into light, self-correcting and self-ad- 
justing, conveying sensations of color accord- 
ing to class of nerve fibers impressed and of 
form according to their number. And it 
alone makes clear, as wisdom aforethought, 
the striking harmony between this human 
eye, to which blue gives sense pleasure and 
red sense pain, and the predominance of the 
violet end of the spectrum over the red in 
the colors of external nature — of the preva- 
lence of greens, and azures, and amethystine 
grays, and wood-glooms, in hill and valley, in 
stream and sky, in forest and prairie. 

Do you realize that every flower is an ex- 
pression of some insect's ideal of beauty, 
shaped and tinted and perfumed by the Di- 
vine Craftsman with the design of attracting 
the moth commissioned to carry the pollen 
of male uni-sexual growths to the glutinous 
stigmas of fertile ovules ? Paleontology 
teaches us that plants with gaudy blossoms 
were bidden to bloom upon this earth simul- 
taneously with the creation of nectar-seeking 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 303 

insects. The poet is wrong. There never 
was a flower, in the purpose of God, born to 
blush unseen and waste its sweetness on the 
desert air. And then think of the metabo- 
lism in plant life, whereby lifeless magnesia 
and lime are converted, through the agency 
of chlorophyl, into starch and sugar. Is this 
an accident of the fortuitous concourse of 
atoms ? 

Even in the little things of creation, the 
investigating mind detects the hand of the 
Infinite. Atoms as well as mountain chains 
reveal the vastness of the Divine Artificer's 
resources, and kindle in a meditative soul a 
sense of the Limitless. So infinitesimally 
subtile and minute are the particles of ether, 
that Tyndall estimated if all were swept to- 
gether from the remotest corners of space, 
they could be crowded into a common match- 
box. In like manner, the imagination is con- 
founded by the revelations of the microscope ; 
the mind is appalled by the vastness of the 
invisible world, is embarrassed and overpow- 
ered in its efforts to comprehend the Potency 
that fashions the minutest of structures and 
becomes filled with a feeling of intense ex- 
altation. 

If you should examine the bottoms of the 



304 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES 

little ponds to north of us, you would find 
them covered to a varying depth with the 
siliceous walls of dead microscopic plants 
called diatoms, that form the tripoli or elec- 
tro-silicon of commerce — so minute that 
thousands of them would be required to bury 
a pin's head. Their exquisite symmetry, del- 
icate sculpturing, and matchless coloration, 
give but momentary enjoyment apart from 
the thought of complete adaptation to their 
environment by divine wisdom, and com- 
plete fulfillment in such adaptation of divine 
purpose. The conscious apprehension of 
such perfect congruity not only gives us the 
pleasurable feeling of true Beauty, which in- 
cludes the perfection of uses, but brings us 
into loving touch with the Eternal God of 
Harmony. 

But when we leave behind the glories of 
this lilliputian planet we have become accus- 
tomed to, and stare through the windows of 
the galaxy into immeasurable fathomless 
space beyond, where universe of blazing suns 
succeeds to universe as star succeeds to star 
in the welkin above us — then it is that we 
find ourselves confronting a mighty creative 
instrumentality — an Absolute Author and 
Finisher, unattainable by the conditioned 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 305 

processes of logical thought — God, Jehovah, 
Eternal, One, Personal as is identity to the 
soul. Then it is that we realize the truth of 
the Psalmist's declaration, " The fool hath 
said in his heart, There is no Personal God" — 
then it is that the awful fact bursts upon us : 
The unbeliever, the skeptic, the agnostic is 
mad ! 

What are these stars ? To the careless 
observer, the stellar universe is beautiful ; but 
only he who grasps the moral force behind 
the blue, who ascends to the creating and the 
controlling Intellect, experiences the highest 
satisfaction its beauty can give. 

The moral force behind the sapphire — re- 
gioned stars ! " It is not all that I see of the 
British," said Hyder Ali, "that so impresses 
me ; but what I do not see — the power beyond 
the ocean — the power in reserve." So it is 
the mysterious ulterior force, acting with 
reference to a specific end, that awakens 
within us Christians the devotional spirit in 
its perfection. It is not so much the physi- 
cal fact, as the truth of which that fact is an 
utterance, and that Truth is God ! 

What are these Stars? The doctrine of 

a plurality of worlds— that these heavenly 

bodies are inhabited as well as the earth— is 
20 



306 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES 

perfectly consonant with reason and analogy. 
It seems incredible that this insignificant 
atom of the universe — our little world — a 
dwarf amid myriads of giants that surround 
it, should be exalted to an importance beyond 
all the rest by being made the only one peo- 
pled with immortal souls ! Is it likely that 
the Almighty created the infinity of starry 
hosts simply to give light to our diminutive 
planet, or for the adornment of our noc- 
turnal landscape, or even for the contempla- 
tion of his own divine eye ? Do we find any- 
where in the wide realm of nature the 
slightest waste of material, or creative power 
ever exerted without a purpose? Is any 
portion of energy ever lost or destroyed ? Is 
not every leaf a microcosm ? Does not a 
clod of earth teem with bacteria ? and is not 
a drop of water a universe in itself filled with 
inhabitants of its own as perfectly fitted by 
Divine Wisdom to their residence as are we 
to ours ? And can we doubt that the same 
design extends to the great objects of crea- 
tion as to the small ? Can we reconcile to 
our ideas of infinite love and wisdom the 
thought that the stupendous worlds which 
spangle our firmament are meaningless, use- 
less, lifeless deserts ? Such questions will 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 307 

suggest themselves to the reflecting mind, 
and may carry with them the conviction that 
our sister planets, and even the distant 
twinkling stars, are, have been, or are to be, 
inhabited. Not necessarily by beings of like 
physical constitutions with ourselves — indeed 
that, under their different conditions of light, 
heat, and electrical energy, would be impos- 
sible ; but by other sheep, not of this fold, 
adapted to their circumstances by the same 
Omniscient Power that has fitted us to ours. 
There are those who find no more in the 
magnificence of the heavens than in the 
bawbles of a jewelry shop ; yet the hand of 
God has there " written legibly " that man 
may know the personality as well as the 
glory and omnipotence of the Maker. Is 
there any rational explanation of all the in- 
tricate machinery of the universe independent 
of God? Can you conceive of cause here 
without conceiving of it as power consciously 
exerted ? 

Intentional adaptation is the lesson of Na- 
ture. The manifestation of thought in the 
universe necessitates a thinker ! Christian- 
ity discerns order which implies mind, as well 
in the grouping of iridescent scales on a but- 
terfly's wing as in the disposition of worlds 



3 o8 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES 

in the firmament It beholds its God again 
in the economy of Nature, and interprets the 
law of economy as an eternal principle, like 
that of unity, proportion, order, harmony. In 
common with the laws of physics and math- 
ematics, they all imply the Divine. But not 
order, nor developing purpose, nor omni- 
present energy, nor physical law is God. 
They are but utterances of Infinite Design. 

When questioned by the officers of the 
Inquisition as to his belief in a Supreme 
Being, Galileo, the famous Italian physicist 
and astronomer, mindful of the mathematical 
principle that a hollow cylinder with its cen- 
tral air-shaft is vastly stronger than a solid 
cylinder of equal diameter, picked up a straw 
from the floor of his dungeon, and facing his 
persecutors, replied with all the courage of 
his conviction : " Were there nothing else in 
Nature to convince me of the existence of a 
God, this straw alone would be sufficient." 

There is either intelligent design in ac- 
cordance with the universal, necessary, and 
eternal principles of Science — or else the 
universe is a chance product, which to me 
would imply an infinitely greater miracle. 

Grant for the nonce that certain chemical 
elements combined by hap to make a sun ; 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 309 

it is in the highest degree improbable that 
the same number of similar elements should 
do so a second time. We might as well be 
asked to believe that Hamlets and Paradise 
Losts may be manufactured by shaking al- 
phabets together in a tea-box. In illustra- 
tion of the theory of chance repetition, Pro- 
fessor Jevons calls attention to the fact that 
in whist playing the number of distinct pos- 
sible deals is so vast, and the variety of games 
so incalculably great, that no one game could 
be exactly like another except by intention. 
Apply this well-known law of chance to the 
universe, and it utterly fails to explain what 
we see. It is much easier to admit design ; 
there is more reason here for faith than 
doubt. 

A favorite Agnostic belief which denies 
Gods personal authorship, and has much of 
luck and hap about it, is the Darwinian the- 
ory of self-evolving organisms — a very old 
theory, by the way, and not original with 
Charles Darwin, for Sanconiathon, the Phoe- 
nician, taught in the fourteenth century R. C. 
that intelligent beings were evolved from ani- 
mals not possessing sensation. Grant the 
truth of this, if you please, and where arc 
we? Suppose we do share an animal nature, 



310 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES 

an animal way of moving, digesting, oxygen- 
ating blood, with higher brutes, and sub-con- 
scious states with jelly-fishes. Suppose we 
do possess a psyche in common with lower 
animals. If God chose — I say if, for I do not 
believe he did choose — to perfect the animal 
part of me out of a medusa, what matters it ? 
I know that I represent a spiritual order of 
creatures. I know that I am made in his 
image. If I could have risen to this from 
lower forms of animal life, what faith I must 
have in further possibilities of expansion. 
There is practically no horizon to my devel- 
opment. But however it may be, I cannot 
but see God at the heart of primordial chaos 
as I see him in the center of twentieth-cen- 
tury civilization. 

Now, granted the existence of design, of 
perfect adaptation of means to ends, of parts 
to wholes, of organisms to environment, — 
which only they of unsound mind deny, — and 
immortality must be admitted. Why ? Be- 
cause, whereas the psyche or brute spirit whose 
end is the mere animation of protoplasm 
finds full scope for its activities and develop- 
ment in this world — the pneuma or soul, that 
whereby man is made a sharer in the attri- 
butes of Deity, falls short of the climax of its 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 311 

growth amid an environment like this. " Deny 
the existence of God,' 1 said W. H. Mallock, in 
the " Fortnightly Review," " deny mans free- 
dom and immortality, and by no other con- 
ceivable hypothesis can you vindicate for 
man's life any possible meaning." The ca- 
pacities inherent in man's nature demand 
eternity for their evolution. Earth surround- 
ings and soul possibilities are out of har- 
mony. When I accept adaptation as the 
exponent of all natural and spiritual laws, I 
must believe in a personal God and concede 
personal immortality. 

Deniers of immortality contend that con- 
sciousness is but a mere function of ani- 
mated, healthy brain ; hence that a given in- 
dividual must cease to be conscious when his 
brain begins its physical decay at death. 
This is true so far as the manifestation of that 
particular consciousness through that par- 
ticular brain is concerned ; for the brain is 
simply a transmitter of consciousness, as the 
telephone is a transmitter of speech. As- 
suredly, the possibility of its transmission by 
electricity does not affect the existence of 
speech. The telephone does not produce 
articulate audible sounds because it transmits 
them. The piano is not the creator of music 



312 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES 

because it is an instrument of musical ex 
pression. Music, speech, consciousness, are 
realities outside and above all media of trans- 
mission. 

A friend who is very dear to me, a graduate 
of one of our great universities, recently 
writes that he can find no satisfactory proofs 
of immortality. He admits that nothing can 
be destroyed, but doubts conscious identity 
beyond the grave. He tells me he cannot 
reconcile the idea of a future life of recogni- 
tion and loving communion with an exalted 
conception of the universe; that such a belief 
seems to him to be founded on a false esti- 
mate of the importance of the individual, as 
it appeals to the selfish desires of mankind 
by holding forth a hope of resurrection. In 
this popular position of the day, what is ac- 
corded to matter, force, and energy, is de- 
nied to soul, viz., indestructibility. Moreover, 
wherein lies the selfishness of working out 
one's salvation in Christ? How is it any 
more selfish than working out by attention 
to business ones immunity from the cares, 
discomforts, and suffering incident to life in 
this world ? Although in so doing I may 
invite a diagnosis of Gargantuan stupidity, I 
must frankly admit that I cannot see. I fear 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 313 

the reconciliation of this difference between 
us will have to be left to the great Eclair- 
cissement 

I recognize in the phase of opinion my 
friend has honestly adopted a result of mod- 
ern university instruction with its deplorable 
tendency to unsettle belief. And I cannot 
characterize in terms too condemnatory the 
indifference of boards of trustees and col- 
lege presidents to the religious training of 
the youth for whose character-formation they 
are largely responsible. At the judgment 
seat they will be required to answer for their 
pusillanimous evasion of duty — they who 
should stand ready to sacrifice every con- 
sideration connected with what is called the 
higher learning to guard the honor and god- 
ship of Jesus Christ not only in the Sunday 
passiveness of high-priced pews, but in their 
week-day service as fiduciaries of souls — 
they who quiet their consciences by employ- 
ing chaplains to talk religion to handfuls of 
students, while paying large salaries to free- 
thinkers and agnostics to distribute the 
pseudo-sweets of skepticism among assaila- 
ble thousands. It is the duty of the presi- 
dent of a college which has long been re- 
garded by the community as Christian in its 



314 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES 

teachings and tendencies to purge his faculties 
of all instructors, no matter how distinguished 
from the world's point of view, who would 
treat the social or theological system of Christ 
as merely ancillary to some modern hypothe- 
sis, or question the truth of the immortality 
promised by him who said to the crucified 
thief at his side, " To-day thou shalt be with 
me in paradise." If consideration for what 
society or culture may think of his action 
weighs with such an officer, he is utterly un- 
worthy of the sacred trust implied in his ac- 
ceptance of the presidency of a Christian 
university. 

It is sad to contemplate the prevailing 
trend of American higher education toward 
religious looseness, apathy, and agnosticism. 
Christian parents would do well to estimate 
the risk involved in permitting educating 
children to run the gauntlet of influences cal- 
culated to undermine their faith. Christian 
parents should regard it as their sacred duty 
not only to investigate most carefully the 
curriculum of the college they would select 
as the training-mother of their sons and 
daughters, but to test the class-room instruc- 
tion itself with a view to becoming personally 
acquainted with the dangers that must be 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 



3*5 



encountered by young and susceptible matric- 
ulates. Verily there is room in this Chris- 
tian land for a great university distinctly 
loyal to Gospel philosophy in its every de- 
partment and in the aggregate of its schools 
— a university in which the broad principle 
shall obtain of Christ first, educational wares 
and conceits second and subordinate. 

Again, the attitude of your Agnostic toward 
the miracles of Christ is one of contemptu- 
ous, in many cases, of malicious ridicule. But 
under our divine law of adaptation, were not 
miracles consonant with the difficulties in- 
volved in the transformation of human nature 
by the introduction of the Christian system ? 
Nothing short of miraculous intervention 
could have been efficacious in enlisting the 
affections and fixing the faith of the first be- 
lievers. Miracles were the stamp of Christ's 
authority. 

Agnosticism either eliminates the super- 
natural element from the gospel record, ac- 
counting for the miracles of Christ on purely 
natural grounds ; or else it regards the whole 
history of Christ as a myth. " I allege," said 
Annie Besant, " that Jesus is a mythical char- 
acter. I cannot admit the miraculous." And 
Renan went so far as to declare that " the 



3i6 



ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES 



passion of a hallucinated woman gave the 
world its resurrected God " — that Christian- 
ity is thus based on a lie — the false state- 
ment of Mary Magdalene regarding the 
empty sepulcher and the scattered cere- 
ments. 

Now Christianity is a system of belief 
founded on the actual death and resurrec- 
tion of Jesus Christ. Without these, as Paul 
taught, our faith is vain. What ground then 
have we for accepting them as facts? We 
admit the miracle at which Agnosticism jeers 
because, first, it does no outrage to our rea- 
son ; because, secondly, we have irrefutable 
testimony as to its occurrence. Once ap- 
prehend a Supreme God, and the production 
of any effect dependent for its cause on his 
creative will becomes to you a possibility. 
Says the Rev. R. L. Ottley, and well says : 
" The abstract possibility of miracle seems to 
be necessarily implied in the religious con- 
ception of God as a free spiritual being to 
whom the moral interests of the universe 
are of higher importance than the uninter- 
rupted maintenance of physical law." The 
skeptic denies to the Almighty Lawgiver a 
right which he concedes to every human leg- 
islator, viz., the right to suspend the laws he 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 317 

has made ; the right " to intervene in his own 
universe in behalf of his own good purpose." 
There is a Super Nature as well as a Nature. 
To quote St. Augustine : " The Supernatural 
is the conception of an order of truths above 
those of reason, and the conception of a self- 
existent activity superior to that of mind and 
matter as these latter display themselves or- 
dinarily in the field of nature." Miracles are 
indeed contrary to the natural order of 
events, but not necessarily to the constituted 
order of the universe. It is a very narrow 
mind that regards what is called the regular 
course of Nature as " the final gauge and 
measure of the divine omnipotence ; " that 
finds in the production of the visible universe 
the limit of God's infinite creative energy ; 
that fails to see in Nature itself only a tan- 
gible phase of a far larger and grander 
economy. 

But for the moment, while recognizing their 
possibility and their adaptation to the social 
crises they were designed to meet and con- 
trol in the interest of the truth, suppose we 
set aside all miracles as imaginary — have we 
anything left ? Anything in the human life 
of the Son of God on which our souls can 
feed, any inspiration, any comfort, any hope, 



318 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES 

in the words of that Jesus of whom it was 
said, " Never man spake like this man ? " 
Words for all time, not for an age — teach- 
ings which science cannot refute, which the 
worst of infidels approve ; which Huxley him- 
self, while contending that the Bible is a tis- 
sue of lies, advocated the expediency of read- 
ing and diffusing among the people? We 
have left the religion of Christ adapted for 
everlasting to the wants, the aspirations, the 
disappointments, the sorrows of mankind. 
No higher criticism will ever destroy it — no 
obscuration of records, no inconsistent trans- 
lations, no perishing of manuscripts, no ob- 
literation of Scriptures. We believe and we 
know that we have this eternally true religion 
in the Bible; we have other things there, but 
this is the jewel that is priceless. Therefore 
I say let skeptics and critics take what they 
will from the Sacred Text ; let them insist 
that many a dogma of the church reposes on 
no better foundation than erroneous render- 
ings of the Vulgate ; let them ridicule the 
bedevilment of the Gadarene swine ; let them 
remain persuaded that the Pentateuch is a 
recent forgery of Jewish scribes; let them 
split Isaiah into four individuals. Grant that 
the prophecies of Daniel were written long 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 3 i 9 

after the events predicted had occurred ; and 
the Psalms of David date 500 years this side 
of the poet king ; and that Moses, who was 
known by name as a great lawgiver to 
Manetho, to Strabo, and Tacitus, and Ju- 
venal, to Celsus, and Porphyry, and Julian 
the Apostate, never existed at all. Give in- 
fidel and censor, and fault-finder of the If- 
I-were-God type all they ask — and we Chris- 
tians need have no misgivings. For the 
religion of Jesus Christ is independent of, 
and immeasurably higher than, traditions, 
and translations, and canons of Scripture. 
It must perdure in all its beauty and power 
because it is so substantially interwoven with 
the threads of human destiny as to admit of 
no disentanglement, so deeply interfused 
with truth inerrant as to constitute its very 
soul. It is the brightening, reforming, exalt- 
ing world-force that ties the human soul for- 
ever to its God. 

But are we under the necessity of dis- 
pensing with miracles? Have we no unim- 
peachable testimony regarding the greatest 
of all miracles, the resurrection of Christ, on 
which depends the validity of Christianity ? 
Is it a historic fact ? Was it an empty or an 
occupied tomb into which Mary of Magdala 



320 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES 

peered? Is Jesus Christ the Son of God or 
an impudent impostor? "Science," says 
President Schurman, in " Agnosticism and 
Religion," " is simply the record of the be- 
havior of things under the established order; 
neither her method nor her apparatus en- 
ables her to go beyond this limit ; and when 
Omnipotence comes upon the scene, she is 
smitten with impotence. Only there are such 
good reasons for faith in the continuity of 
natural causation that no one can be expected 
to believe, without the strongest evidence, in 
a breach due to the miracle of supernatural 
agency." Have we such evidence for the 
resurrection of Christ ? 

In cases where personal knowledge is in- 
sufficient, we naturally turn to the experience 
of others w r hence really comes the great mass 
of what we know. It is what others have 
seen or heard that constitutes history, estab- 
lishes guilt or innocence, proves or refutes 
crucial questions. Concurrence in the oral 
or written testimony of a number of witnesses 
determines facts with absolute certainty. 
The story of the gospels, embodying the 
consistent testimony of the four Evangelists, 
is a perfect illustration of this kind of proof. 
In connection with the substantial agreement 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 321 

of the four reports, I quote briefly from "An 
Examination of the Testimony of the Four 
Evangelists by the Rules of Evidence Ad- 
ministered in Courts of Justice," in which are 
presented the convincing arguments of Prof 
Simon Greenleaf of the Harvard Law 
School, a great American authority on this 
very law of evidence : " The character of 
their narratives is like that of all other true 
witnesses containing substantial truth under 
circumstantial variety. There is enough dis- 
crepancy to show that there could have been 
no previous concert among them ; and at the 
same time such substantial agreement as to 
prove that they all were independent nar- 
rators of the same great transaction. The 
discrepancies between the narratives of the 
several Evangelists, when carefully examined, 
will not be found sufficient to invalidate their 
testimony. If these different accounts of the 
same transactions were in strict verbal con- 
formity with each other, the argument against 
their credibility would be strong. All thai 
is asked for the witnesses is, that their testi- 
mony may be regarded as we regard the tes- 
timony of men in the ordinary affairs of life. 
If the evidence of the Evangelists is to be 

rejected because of a few minor discrepancies 

21 



322 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES 

among them, we shall be obliged to discard 
that of many of the contemporaneous histo- 
ries on which we are accustomed to rely." 

There is no discrepancy in the gospels re- 
garding any essential fact or important doc- 
trine or duty. Omission is not contradiction. 
Matthew overlooked the vision of the shep- 
herds; Luke the visit of the Magi and the 
slaughter of the Innocents — but for this rea- 
son Matthew and Luke are certainly not to 
be adjudged as contradicting the other Evan- 
gelists who mention these events ! More- 
over, to continue the quotation from Professor 
Greenleaf: "It is impossible to read their 
writings and not feel that we are conversing 
with men eminently holy, acting under an 
abiding sense of the presence of God and of 
their accountability to him. Now, though in 
a single instance a good man may fall when 
under strong temptation, he is not found per- 
sisting for years in deliberate falsehood, as- 
serted with the most solemn appeals to God, 
without the slightest temptation or motive, 
and against all the opposing interests which 
reign in the human breast. If, on the con- 
trary, they are supposed to have been bad 
men, it is incredible that such persons should 
have chosen this form of imposture, enjoin- 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 323 

ing as it does unfeigned repentance, the for- 
saking of falsehood and every other sin, the 
practice of self-denial and self-abasement, the 
crucifixion of the flesh with all its earthly ap- 
petites and desires, and hearty contempt of 
the vanities of the world. It is incredible 
that bad men should invent falsehoods to 
promote the religion of the God of Truth. 
From such absurdity, there is no escape ex- 
cept in the admission that the Evangelists 
were good men testifying to that which they 
had carefully observed and considered and 
well knew to be true." 

The accounts given by these trustworthy 
narrators of the life and character of Christ 
display a wonderful uniformity, leaving no 
room for doubt that the same Divine Origi- 
nal sat for the several portraits. And this 
Jesus, according to the accounts of his dis- 
ciples (whose testimony regarding their 
Master we are certainly under as great obli- 
gation to accept as that of the disciples ol 
Confucius, Socrates, and Buddha)— this Jesus 
fore-announced his resurrection, and staked 
upon its occurrence the truth of his divine 
mission. The fact that he did so, pro> 
that he was not an impostor. The fart thai 
his twelve disciples held to their belief in his 



3 2 4 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES 

rising from the dead amid a maelstrom of 
persecution which whirled them to horrible 
deaths, proves that they were not unprincipled 
falsifiers. 

But we are to remember that the gospel 
accounts constitute but a small part of the 
mass of ancient testimony in favor of the 
Resurrection. The various Epistles of the 
New Testament reflect first-century belief 
concerning this event — the Epistles to the 
Romans, Corinthians, and Galatians (char- 
acterized by Renan as " unquestionable and 
unquestioned") having been indited within 
thirty years of our Lords death. And these 
Epistles have borne witness through the ages 
to the crucifixion of Christ for our sins, and 
his rising for our justification. From these, 
as well as from Tacitus, Pliny, and other 
pagan sources, we learn that the personality 
of Jesus Christ attracted unwonted notice in 
the history of the time ; that he was crucified 
under Pontius Pilate, and that thereafter his 
followers, called Christians, founded churches 
throughout the Roman Empire, worshiping 
Christ as their Lord, and for love of him and 
belief in his resurrection, joyfully accepting 
the most painful and ignominious deaths 
with songs of praise upon their lips. In the 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 325 

first Apology of Justin Martyr (138 A. D.) 
addressed in behalf of the Christian Church 
to the Emperor Antoninus Pius, we have di- 
rect historical* testimony of the resurrection, 
with references to Memoirs of Christ, com- 
posed by the Apostles and called gospels, 
as being read in the churches every Sunday 
from Syria to Gaul. And Papias, Bishop of 
Hierapolis, at the beginning of the second 
century, bears witness to having received in- 
formation respecting the first and second 
gospel from John the Presbyter, who had 
conversed with the immediate witnesses of 
Christ's resurrection. 

But further than this and of immensely 
greater importance, God has brought to the 
knowledge of the world, within the last ten 
years, a Harmony of the Four Canonical Gos- 
pels compiled in the second century, and from 
that time to this locked up in Syriac and 
Arabic texts. I refer to the Diatessaron, or 
Fourfold Gospel, of Tatian the Syrian, a dis- 
ciple of Justin Martyr, who embraced Chris- 
tianity at Rome and constructed from the 
four original standards he there studied a 
composite gospel, read for centuries in the 
churches of Syria. This Diatessaron was re- 
ferred to by ancient writers before 250 A. D., 



326 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES 

and it proves incontestably the existence of 
the four gospels, practically as we now have 
them, at the threshold of the second century. 
Hence they could not have been forgeries, or 
the manufactures of the Council of Nice in 
325 A. D., as has been declared by inventive 
infidels to throw discredit upon them. The 
three hundred years Annie Besant cannot 
bridge have been bridged by God. 

Once more, two institutions in the Chris- 
tian Church — the Lords Supper and the 
Lord's Day (which displaced the Jewish 
Passover and Sabbath) have borne witness 
from the beginning that Jesus really did die 
and really did rise from the dead. Ration- 
alistic infidels take pleasure in asserting that 
he did not die, but passed into a swoon or 
trance from which the aroma of the burial 
spices awakened him to consciousness — but 
it is the testimony of all history that Jesus 
w r as dead. Mural paintings in catacombs of 
the second century perpetuate his death and 
resurrection. All Palestine admitted it. 
When Peter charged the men of Israel with 
the murder of Jesus before the Sanhedrim, 
the accusation was not repelled, as it would 
have been if untrue; and John the beloved 
disciple testifies, with scientific exactness that 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 327 

the physical cause of the death of Christ was 
rupture of the heart, whereby the pericardial 
sac was filled with blood — shortly separated 
into serum and clot which followed the spear 
thrust of the Roman soldier as blood and 
water. Roman executioners were sure in 
their work. And never man died like this 
man. " Read the history of Christ from the 
procession of palms to the crucifixion," said 
Gladstone, "and what a superhuman majesty 
is spread over the whole. You may talk of 
all religions as being essentially one and the 
same ; but what religion presents to its vota- 
ries such a sight as this? The behavior of 
our Lord in the extremity of his debasement 
transcends all human limits, and exhibits 
without arguing his divinity." 

No contemporary doubted that the King 
of the Jews was dead when Joseph of Arima- 
thea, the friend of Pilate, laid his body in the 
tomb. Within two months after the crucifix- 
ion, on the day of Pentecost, the Apostles, 
who were not deceived, who could not have 
been deceived, proclaimed his resurrection, 
and founded a Church which would have 
been meaningless without it. You and I 
have as logical a reason for believing that 
Jesus Christ died and rose from the dead as 



328 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES 

that Queen Elizabeth once sat upon the 
throne of England, or that on May day, 
1898, Commodore Dewey destroyed the 
Spanish squadron in the harbor of Manila. 

In conclusion, let me say to my doubting 
friend : Examine the evidence, pro as well as 
con, before you pass sentence. Remember 
that intellects like those of Bacon and Kep- 
ler, and Newton, and Daniel Webster, and 
many modern men of science, looking at the 
evidence, accepted it because there was reason 
behind it. Do not, like the gifted author of 
" Robert Elsmere," that story of the battle 
of beliefs, inform yourself only in the nega- 
tive writers, and remain ignorant of the Chris- 
tian apologists. Do not allow your thirst to 
be slaked by the scanty draughts of knowl- 
edge that have quenched hers. Do not ac- 
cept the unsatisfying substitute offered for 
revealed religion by a woman whose mind 
has been tickled, but whose soul remains un- 
touched, and who gives back practically noth- 
ing for the belief she would destroy. Re- 
member, she would not seek to steal your 
faith if it were not worth stealing. Judge 
fairly whether historical Christianity rests 
solely on testimony that is so easily over- 
thrown, or whether it is its own best proof — 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 329 

whether it is an orchid hanging on emotion 
only, or strikes its roots deep down into the 
soil of intellect. 

If you will look the seventh time from 
Carmel, be sure you will detect the fluffy 
cloud that forecasts the mighty rain. You 
are under obligations to look that seventh 
time. Take the road you are sure is the 
right one. Take some road. Stand no longer 
in dreamy hesitation or obstinate inactivity 
at the crossing. Let me say to you that I 
am confident I have incontrovertible evidence 
of the existence of an All-Wise God, in the 
nature about me, in the happenings of my 
own life ; and of the death and resurrection 
of his Son Jesus Christ at Jerusalem between 
30 and 33 A. D. from the testimony of his- 
tory. The burden of proof rests on the Ag- 
nostic. Let him offset this with convincing 
evidence to the contrary. 

I believe also in the inspiration and authen- 
ticity of this Bible as the revealed Word of 
God. From it, you can subtract nothing. To 
its genuine text, you can add nothing. It is 
"a simple book for simple men." Only those 
who know least about it prate glibly of its 
inconsistencies. Only the Simonists of phi- 
losophy falsely so-called levy tascal and black- 



330 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES 

mail. Only they who have private purpose 
or selfish aim to subserve would shroud its 
clear statements in obscurity, or make it all 
a mystical allegory requiring the skill of a 
learned profession to decipher and explain. 
"Turn it and turn it again," said a wise Tal- 
mudic author, " for everything is in it" It 
has withstood the attacks of the worlds infi- 
dels from the spleen of Celsus and the blas- 
phemy of Porphyry to the dangerous inaccu- 
racy and willful misrepresentation of Robert 
Ingersoll. Humanity is growing weary of 
their driving sleet of falsehood and abuse 
that passes as argument among illiterate 
scoffers. If this book were vulnerable, rest 
assured the weak spots would have been ex- 
posed centuries ago; for no book on earth 
has stood the cautery of such searing criti- 
cism as the New Testament. The fact that 
its haters have descended to pasquinade 
demonstrates its inviolability. 

Now if I believe in an all-wise, all-loving 
God, at once transcendent and immanent, in- 
finite in power and everywhere at work, a 
Being to whom I owe my life and my all — a 
God of love upon whom I can rely so implic- 
itly as to say, Though he slay me, yet will I 
trust in him — surely I can accept his plan of 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 331 

salvation for the race to which I belong, 
through an Incarnation " stupendously divine 
and yet so sweetly human," by the sacrifice 
of Jesus Christ his only Son with whom he 
has promised freely to give me all things. 
And I can build upon the assurance he alone 
has vouchsafed that this visible is not all ; on 
the hope of a future life of happy activities, 
on the interpretation of death as joyous arri- 
val at the Fathers House rather than reluc- 
tant departure from a strange and opportu- 
nity-exhausted land. 

Ah! dear friends, when we are called upon 
to shake hands with Time; when we are ap- 
prised no longer to go to those deep wells 
of mystery with the cracked pitchers of our 
imperfect intellects — O ! may it not be our 
lot to feel with the philosopher of Malmes- 
bury that we are taking a fearful step in the 
dark, or with the mother of Hume that the 
Pyrrhonism which we have embraced in lieu 
of the simple, satisfying faith of our child- 
hood is woefully insufficient — the mess of 
pottage for the birthright. But may we look 
back with joy and satisfaction upon lives of 
loyalty to Him of Bethlehem, and forward with 
hope uncomprised through faith in the Son 
of God to a blessed certainty beyond the veil 



332 EVIDExNCES OF CHRISTIANITY. 

May God give us light, even the light of 
the knowledge of Christ, to dispel all clouds 
of doubt and agnosticism ; may God give us 
faith in all his inexplicable dispensations; 
may God bring us into that closest commun- 
ion with the Saviour that must render our 
position as Christian believers impregnable 
alike to the assaults of Satan and the sophis- 
try of man. 



Evidences of Christianity. 

(Be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you 
a reason of the hope that is in you. I Peter iii. 15.) 

My concluding address must be intro- 
duced with an apology. I stand here to- 
night to give you a reason of the hope that 
is in me, not reasons in full for that reason. 
It were impossible in the brief space of one 
hour to make any searching examination imo 
the evidences of Christianity, or even intelli- 
gibly to enumerate the sources of proof. The 
presentation of a complete argument would 
necessitate many courses of lectures and im- 
ply a lifetime of thought. 

Still, on the principle that, as intellect has 
in this day so much more to do with Chris- 
tian belief than mere feeling, every Chris- 
tian should have some presentable theory of 
his faith, it would seem wise to exhibit cardi- 
nal results and all-satisfying convictions for 
your serious consideration. And this is all 
the more important because so few who bear 
the Christian name, and who believe in the 
Bible simply because their parents once told 
them that it is the word of God, are at all 



334 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES 

capable of advancing any rational reason for 
their belief. If what may be said this even- 
ing shall have the effect of stimulating per- 
sonal research on your part, leading you, in 
accordance with the advice of King Solomon 
in Ecclesiastes vii. 25, to apply your hearts " to 
seek out wisdom, and the reason of things, 
and to know the wickedness of folly, even of 
foolishness and madness," and I may add of 
spiritual insensibility and agnostic indiffer- 
ence, I shall feel that God has blessed my 
unworthy but sincere efforts in the cause of 
truth. 

Incontestable evidences of revealed re- 
ligion other than attested miracles, which 
have already been considered, are to be 
found : 

I. In the fulfillment of predictive prophe- 
cies. 

II. In the spiritual victories of Christi- 
anity. 

III. In the debt of the world to the Chris- 
tian religion. 

IV. In subjective personal conviction. 

St. Augustine somewhere wisely remarks, 
" A Christian ought to study the prophets in 
order that he may not forget why he be- 
lieves." Fulfilled prophecy is indeed a 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 335 

" light that shineth in the dark places " and 
as such is one of the most convincing evi- 
dences of revelation ; for admittedly none 
can know the future except the great Dis- 
poser of historic events and the human 
minds he selects for impression with visions 
of what is to be. The political economist 
sees in the records of the human race only 
the automatic workings of a law of cause 
and effect ; the Christian recognizes the dis- 
pensations of that Being who has so con- 
nected cause and effect as to compel events, 
and who clearly foresees all the future. Vol- 
umes have been written on the fulfillment of 
prophecy, of which both infidel and Chris- 
tian believer are as a rule entirely ignorant. 
Not only is the career of the Messiah in his 
character as God and Man, as Prophet, 
Priest, and King, clearly portrayed by He- 
brew seers — Christ thrown into superlative 
relief, in whom and through whom the scepter 
has not yet departed from Judah — but a 
hundred and one several predictions, whose 
minute fulfillment is most astonishingly au- 
thenticated by modern observers and critics, 
prove that Omniscience itself dictated these 
forecasts of far-off days. The Christian 
Bible is the only sacred book that unerringly 



336 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES 

predicts, and hence bears unequivocal stamp 
of inspiration. No thoughtful person can 
read it without being spelled. It was written 
to withstand the worst that malice and 
hatred can project ; to impress human 
natures so long as there are human natures 
to impress. It is the voice of the only God 
who has never failed to make good promise 
or threat. 

Leaving you to peruse the unanswerable 
reasoning of Dr. Alexander Keith in his 
work on prophecy, a most effective antidote 
for skepticism, I shall ask your attention 
only to a single instance of foreknowledge 
which, so far as I am aware, theologians 
have not estimated at its true worth. I re- 
fer to the marvelous prevision of the tenth 
chapter of Genesis, which anticipates the 
great philological discoveries of the last fifty 
years, and thus puts to the foil colorable 
argument against the credibility of the Pen- 
tateuch. The subject of this chapter is 
Ethnic Affinities, and its statements are 
conspicuous among what our infidel friends 
have been pleased to characterize as the mis- 
takes of Moses. 

Confining ourselves to the genealogy of 
Japheth, we here learn that Gomer the Celt, 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 337 

and Magog the Slav, and Madai the Indo- 
Iranian, and Javan the Graeco-Roman, and 
Tiras the Teuton, shall successively hold 
sway ; and we may infer, through ascending 
levels of civilization, to the climax plane the 
Anglo-Norman stands upon to-day. The 
parts played by these peoples of Moses in the 
great drama of history, according to the Bible 
accounts, correspond precisely with the parts 
assigned by profane records to the founders 
of Celtic France and Britain, whose golden 
age has been fixed at one thousand years 
before Christ ; to the first settlers of Slavonic 
Russia, Poland, and Bohemia ; to the fathers 
of Vedic Aryans and monotheistic Zoroas- 
trians, of Pelasgian Greeks and Italians, of 
Teutonic Germans and Scandinavians. Com- 
parative philology, a science of this century, 
from a study of existing speech has conclu- 
sively proved that the tongues spoken by 
the ancient Japhetic races, as well as the 
descended modern languages, agree in their 
words and grammatical structure. Thus it 
establishes their kinship and proves the fore- 
cast of Moses, who, looking into the tenant- 
less forests of Europe predicted, fifteen 
hundred years before the Christian era, their 

occuprncy by the races who have made them 
22 



338 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES 

the foci of civilization. What is there but 
the communicated prescience of the Al- 
mighty to explain this clear vision of the 
prophet wherein he beheld the future of 
those nations of the Caucasian race that for 
centuries enjoyed the dominion of the an- 
cient world as well as of those that are now 
foremost in physical and intellectual power ? 
The prophecies of the tenth chapter of Gene- 
sis are among the most awe-inspiring in the 
Bible. They could not have been forged at 
any time before 1850, because the knowledge 
they embody has become known since the 
middle of the present century. Hence, so 
far as this chapter is concerned, the Penta- 
teuch, if forged by modern Jewish scribes as 
alleged, must have been forged within the 
last fifty years, and this is the delirium of 
infidel audacity. Age after age God discov- 
ers to us new proof of the integrity of his 
Word. Blot out every other prophecy of the 
Bible, and this forecast of Japhetic distribu- 
tion and supremacy would convince me of 
the truth of its inspiration. 

In passing, let me suggest that accurate 
retrospect is as much a miracle as unerring 
foresight — looking backward for eons into 
ages of chaos and star-dust and inditing for 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 339 

future generations a true cosmogony. This 
did the man Moses. His Genesis, and the 
revelations of science so far as they go, are in 
accord. Does he not show us that in the begin- 
ning, whenever that was — a hundred million 
years ago, perhaps — God created ; and does 
not physics declare that matter is not self- 
made when it assumes matter and motion 
and explains the universe under their laws 
as it knows them ? It has never ventured 
to hint at a cause for either. Astronomy 
and physics substantiate the account given 
by Moses of a great primitive nebula or in- 
definitely diffused gas filling the void of 
space, of the separation of this into smaller 
nebulous masses, of the concentration of 
these masses into stars, of a self-luminous 
earth with a photosphere like that of the 
sun, and of the formation beneath the pho- 
tosphere of a crusted plant-producing globe, 
from which luminous heavenly bodies which 
had existed through the first, second, and 
third ages, at last become visible in the 
fourth day synchronously with the loss of 
photosphere. God created radiant energy 
or light in the first day by setting particles 
of matter in motion; but nebulous stars were 
invisible from the earth until the luminous 



340 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES 

gas that surrounded it cleared away. To-day 
an observer on Mercury could not see the 
sun through the fiery atmosphere that en- 
wraps the planet. No inhabitant of earth 
has ever seen Mercury's crust through these 
luminous clouds. The apparent placing of 
the creation of the sun and moon so long 
after the creation of radiant energy, in the 
fourteenth verse of the first chapter of Gene- 
sis, is the strongest conceivable evidence 
of the Hebrew cosmologists inspiration. 
Science is just finding out what Moses clearly 
beheld. Geology is confirming the order of 
the successive appearances of life-forms on 
the earth as related by him. His account of 
the creation is forever receiving the support 
pf fresh discoveries. Is it not infinitely more 
rational to admit that these astonishing sur- 
veys of universe construction, these anticipa- 
tions of modern scientific discoveries, were 
revealed by God, than to suppose that a 
mere man, educated though he were in the 
profoundest learning of the Egyptians, should 
have transcended all imaginable exercise of 
human faculties ? 

You will remember that the Galilean car- 
penter foretold to a trembling group of un- 
lettered and unmoneyed disciples, in the face 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 341 

of the blackest of outlooks, the ultimate tri- 
umph of his religion as a world faith. Nearly 
nineteen hundred years have since passed, 
years signalized by spiritual victories that 
stamp such an announcement for the future 
as divine. For never was conflict so unequal : 
a handful of unlearned paupers arrayed 
against the Roman Empire, fearlessly forcing 
a new issue, even salvation through the sac- 
rifice of Christ, and confirming the great 
truth of the Jewish scriptures that there is but 
one God. And what a world their Gospel 
was launched in ! Rome was the center of 
an appalling licentiousness that pervaded art, 
literature, domestic life, public worship. The 
city swarmed with divorced wives. Marriage 
was a mockery. A chance exponent of con- 
jugal virtue who clung to her single husband 
was hissed as a one-man woman. Knights, 
philosophers, poets, patricians, titled ladies, 
and dancing girls, lay drunk together at the 
feast. Sodom was out-Sodomed in the royal 
palace. Murder in every phase was rife and 
thought nothing of — infanticide, matricide, 
uxoricide. Gladiator slew gladiator for the 
delectation of harlots. Emperors controlled 
by unprincipled courtesans steeped them- 
selves in infamy and insane follies. Political 



342 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES 

corruption was ubiquitous and brazen-faced; 
every man had his price. The Empire was 
hopelessly infiltrated with the poison of 
nameless iniquity ; the imperial city was a 
hideous malignant neoplasm. And philoso- 
phy stood by, impotent to check the awful 
ravages of the moral carcinoma. 

Christianity comes upon the scene to win 
its treasures from this cesspool of depravity, 
teaching its lessons of forgiveness and self- 
control, impressing its touch of love on the 
ruffian of the arena and even on the heart of 
the Praetorian soldier, who kneels to its new 
God. In the flames of the stake torch, under 
the teeth of the lion, and on the horns of the 
aurochs, amid the stench and typhus of the 
Mamertine prison, at the shambles of Diocle- 
tian, where the weapons of the executioners 
were dulled by the multitude of martyrs and 
commissioned butchers sunk exhausted to the 
sands — she ever uttered her divine message, 
Peace on earth, Good will to men. From 
every persecution she emerged with renewed 
strength, until at last she saw the fabric of 
pagan mythology shattered ; Caesar, the Sen- 
ate, the Roman people, the iron legions — 
power such as eye of man had never beheld 
nor mind of man conceived, subdued by her 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 343 

persuasive art ; and she rose under Constan- 
tine to imperial sway. Is it conceivable that 
a faith without supernatural support and di- 
rection could have passed through so fiery a 
trial and accomplished such a result, the in- 
tellectual and moral conquest of the Roman 
world ? We are justified in asking, " Of what 
is such a faith incapable ? " The Christian ' 
Church is a greater miracle than the Jew. It 
lives, it thrives, it ever extends its dominion, 
it bestows its gifts with regal grace and dig- 
nity, it educates, it exalts, it comforts in mis- 
fortune attd sorrow, it assures in the hour of 
death. Can this Church be rooted in myth, 
or fiction, or imposture ? 

And then find another evidence of Chris- 
tianity in its victories over individual char- 
acter, its transfiguration of personalities who 
know no law beyond their own passions into 
personalities of opposite traits, dominated by 
spiritual purpose. Nowhere perhaps is this 
more impressively illustrated than amid the 
realism of the Roman amphitheater, when in 
response to the cry of " Christians to the 
lions!" victims flaming with fever, human 
prey with cyanotic lips and clammy hair were 
dragged from the dripping dungeons of the 
Esquiline and thrown to famished wild beasts ; 



344 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES 

when Christian virgins were ravished by glad- 
iators and hurled into the dizzy mellay of 
striped and tawny carnivores, while emperors 
surrounded by lewd bacchantes and prosti- 
tuted vestals looked on and jeered. Amid 
this dream of Hell, Christ reigned supreme in 
the souls of those he called upon to suffer 
for his name. An unearthly calm came into 
their hearts, a holy radiance illuminated their 
faces, they saw as it were the smile of their 
Redeemer, and counting as nought the physi- 
cal anguish, they cried, " O Christ, thy will be 
done." It was this that filled the onlookers 
with terror, this sustaining power imparted 
by a mighty God in the quivers of the death 
agony. And the same spirit is abroad in the 
world to-day, and would empower men and 
women again, should the demand be made 
upon their faith, to hang upon crosses in am- 
phitheaters and blaze in pitch-steeped tunics 
for the sake of their Christian belief. Loy- 
alty to Christ does exist. I believe with Ian 
Maclaren that there has been no age " since 
the days of the Roman martyrs characterized 
by such devotion to the Saviour, whether you 
gather the evidence from the Salvation Army, 
which with all its seeming extravagances is 
touched with a noble and simple heroism, or 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 345 

the missions" whose sweet spirits like Mary 
Reed entomb themselves in leprosaries to 
carry to the most repulsive of physical suffer- 
ers the message of Christian consolation and 
peace. 

The ideal man of this age is the Christian 
man — that true embodiment of all that is 
pure, refined, tender, dignified, consistent, 
humane, self- forgetful, noble, chivalric. His 
kindly manners, his cheery conversation, his 
courteous welcome, his hearty Godspeed, his 
delight in comforting and helping and bestow- 
ing little kindnesses and lifting better up to 
best, are but the legitimate fruits of Christ 
love. His sincerity rebukes the barefaced 
falsehood of a recent writer on Altruism, 
" Everybody is insincere in civilized coun- 
tries." Think of it. Christian character 
must have consistency, the jewel than which 
there is nothing so rare, and I may add, 
nothing so unpopular. There is no caste in 
his Christianity. History reminds us that at 
the festival of Christ's birth, the gala day of 
all the year, the proud baron of the Middle 
Age opened his hall to his vassals and stooped 
to the meanest serf in friendly converse, while 
his sons danced with russet nymphs on the 
village green. All were brothers. But with 



346 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES 

a consistent Christian every day is a Christ- 
mass day, a feast of Christ, on which the 
motor spring of his God love never fails to 
bend him down to the poor and lowly, the 
sick and sorrowing, nay, even to the dis- 
reputable and ungodly. One ought to be 
proud to have it said of him, "This man 
eateth with publicans and sinners." One 
should be happy when he hears it observed, 
" This man will not worship in idol-houses 
where ecclesiastical pride is enthroned with 
all its ceremonial of colors, candles, censer 
scents, and operatic music; where calculating 
etiquette supplants natural courtesy, and 
freezing reserve displaces sunny intercourse ; 
where supercilious officials receive ones serv- 
ice as if he were their serf and not their 
equal before God ; where hard-souled but 
sumptuously dressed patrician constituents 
studiously give the cold shoulder to Christ's 
poor." A discriminating divine once said, 
" The man was never born who could long 
carry the load of such a church with a Christ- 
like love of souls in his heart" 

Finally, the crowning grace of the char- 
acter made new by Divine love is spirituality, 
the diametric contrary of worldliness. How 
the free soul within us detests the worldling. 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 347 

the man or woman in whose eyes sacred 
friendship has only a money equivalent; 
who, as Voltaire described it, " squeezes the 
orange and throws the rind away;" who val- 
ues you only for what can be got out of you, 
and on the first opportunity returns your dis- 
interested kindness with injuries that are 
reflexly profitable. This is the spirit of the 
world ; but spirituality sees the eternal value 
of things, recognizes the touch of Heaven in 
the commonest objects of earth, moves in an 
atmosphere of sympathy and love, and is sen- 
sitive to obligations that sway among angels. 
Such spirituality no infidel can argue away. 
It is the imprint of Christ's own hand, and 
as such, is the strongest character evidence 
that one may ask for the truth of revealed 
religion. 

But while admitting the character-trans- 
forming powers of our faith in certain in- 
stances, some will urge that Christianity is 
disproved by the fact that atrocious crimes 
have been committed in its name ; that it 
has authorized orgies of blood ; that it has 
poisoned the consecrated wafer to make way 
with objectionable persons at the celebra- 
tion of the Eucharist; that it kindled the 
fires of Oxford and of our own Salem ; that 



348 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES 

it has warranted sharp practices, theft, and 
adultery, on the part of its supporters ; that 
it winks at the expenditure of seven hundred 
million dollars annually in this Christian 
land for soul and body killing alcoholic bev- 
erages, compelling the appropriation of an- 
other seven hundred million dollars for the 
relief of the destitution and the punishment 
of the crimes that result directly from the 
drink habit ; that its selfish professors, 
though warned by the voice of medical 
science, deliberately refuse to limit the 
prevalence of preventable diseases by atten- 
tion to a few simple hygienic precautions, 
and thereby are become the most insidious 
and heartless of assassins. There is but one 
answer to this objection. Christianity does 
none of these things. It cannot be held re- 
sponsible for the acts of short-sighted or 
color-blind adherents who have mistaken its 
spirit and misapplied its precepts. The 
virtue of a remedy is not to be gainsaid if 
administered in improper doses or for the 
wrong disease. 

The third general evidence of revealed 
religion is to be found in the progress of 
the human race through nineteen Christian 
centuries. Christianity furnished the educa- 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 349 

tional energy that lifted mankind above the 
depressing influences of barbarism, and ex- 
plains the condition of the world to-day. The 
loyalty to truth, the conformity to high 
ideals of duty and service, the aspirations 
and grand enthusiasms characteristic of mod- 
ern life, reflect the wondrous personality of 
the Man of Calvary. Humanity did not 
civilize itself. Its unaided attempts invari- 
ably culminated in such a state of society as 
obtained at Babylon and Nineveh, at Thebes 
and Memphis, at Athens and Rome. When 
left to himself man has always degenerated 
mentally and morally. Whereas intellectual 
brilliancy is seldom transmitted, and genius 
never, vicious tendencies, as a rule, are. Such 
is the moral of all pre-Christian tales, 

4< 'Tis but the same rehearsal of the past — 

First freedom, and then glory ; when that fails, 

Wealth, vice, corruption, barbarism at last ; 

And History, with all its volumes vast, 

Hath but one page." 

And how true it is to-day that in commu- 
nities where religious obligations are for- 
gotten, where church bell never summons to 
worship, where children grow to maturity in 
ignorance of the Bible, where the dead are 
committed to the earth without God's beni- 
son, where the solemnization of matrimony 



350 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES 

is left to civil officers, where prayer is re- 
garded as a delusion — how true it is that re- 
lapse to moral hebitude is certain. In his 
proclamation announcing Thursday, April 13, 
1899, as Fast Day in New Hampshire, Gov- 
ernor Rollins fearlessly states the issue of 
the times : " No matter what our belief may 
be in religious matters, every good citizen 
knows that when the restraining influences 
of religion are withdrawn from a community, 
its decay, moral, mental, and financial, is swift 
and sure. To me this is one of the strong- 
est evidences of the fundamental truth of 
Christianity." 

Think for a moment what would result if 
Christianity, Christianized by the living 
Christ, completely dominated our modern 
civilization. There would be no need of 
laws, of courts, or of police protection ; of 
jails, almshouses, and reformatories ; no ne- 
cessity for standing armies and fleets of war 
ships. Taxes would be reduced to one-tenth 
of what they are. Poverty, drunkenness, and 
prostitution, would be swept away ; industry, 
prosperity, and a white life for all, would 
take their place. Most of the diseases that 
afflict humanity would disappear. Death in 
youth or in the prime of life would be ex- 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 351 

ceptional; death from contagious maladies, 
unknown. Death by violence, which is 
largely if not entirely preventable, would be 
so rare as to excite the severest reprehen- 
sion. So if, instead of inventing flimsy sub- 
stitutes for the religion of Jesus Christ, men 
would honestly endeavor to carry out his 
principles of brotherly love and civic econo- 
my, a veritable moral and socio-political 
Utopia would immediately materialize. And 
this would mean permanency and progress, 
not retrogression ; for the fruits of untainted 
Christianity once tasted would never be relin- 
quished for the bitter clusters of Gomorrah. 

It were needless to point to the triumphs 
of Christian civilization in this our day : to 
the scores of applications of electrical en- 
ergy; to the advances made in navigation ; to 
the progress toward rapid and comfortable 
land transit ; to the results of exploration 
and colonization ; to the revolutionizing of 
architectural methods in the construction of 
factories, buildings for the transaction of bus- 
iness, and homes ; to astonishing improve- 
ments in the arts of pharmacy, medicine, and 
surgery ; to everyday methods of protection 
from infectious and contagious diseases by 
inoculation with their attenuated poisons ; to 



352 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES 

the application of meteorological knowledge 
in a signal service system ; to the perfecting 
of agricultural and botanical science ; to the 
utterance of the spirit of philanthropy in great 
institutions for the relief of suffering, the care 
of the helpless and the insane, and the treat- 
ment of moral obliquity; to the development 
of aesthetic sensibility in the rude and vulgar, 
with its accompanying increase in soul-recep- 
tivity for ethical impression — and above all 
to the opinion of learned men who are de- 
claring that nature's secrets are still unknown. 
" We are only on the threshold of discovery," 
says Professor Stevenson, " and the coming 
century will disclose wonders far beyond any 
yet disclosed. We know nothing yet. We 
have gathered a few large pebbles from the 
shore ; but the mass of sands is yet to be ex- 
plored." The impulse to sift these sands in 
the interest of humanity is but an expression 
of Christian energy ; and whether the inves- 
tigators are believers or unbelievers, the pos- 
sibilities of this age along the multitudinous 
lines of scientific research are conditioned 
entirely by a civilization that is handmaiden 
to the religion of Jesus Christ. Again I de- 
clare the miracle par excellence of Christian- 
ity to be the condition of this world to-day. 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 353 

In conclusion, the strongest of all argu- 
ments for Christianity is the argument from 
Christian experience, that subjective convic- 
tion which springs from a personal acquaint- 
ance and communion with the Saviour, that 
sense of Christ within one through which he 
knows the realness of his belief with the same 
unswerving certainty that he knows his own 
existence. This cannot be shaken out of the 
believer in whose heart Christ dwells. He 
will die for it. Is there any agnostic or the- 
osophist or man of science who is prepared 
to say here, to-night, I am ready to lay down 
my life for my way of thinking, for my belief 
— or unbelief — is more to me than human 
existence and all that human existence stands 
for ? There is no illusion, no imagination, 
no insanity about Christian certainty. The 
experiences of every follower of Jesus are too 
intimately bound up with divine intervention 
and direction. Who of us in reviewing his 
life does not recognize the guiding hand of 
Providence at every turn in answer to his 
mothers prayers — the support in temptation, 
the rescue from overwhelming agonies of 
body and of soul, the reservation for achieve- 
ments undreamed of and seemingly impossi- 
ble ? We Christians feel a divine support 
23 



354 ENEMIES AND EVIDENCES 

unknown, outside of Christianity, in the his- 
tory of man. 

Have you this sense of God within you ? 
If not, you are hardly equipped to discuss the 
problem with those who have, for there is no 
common ground on which you can meet them. 
I can only advise you who may be agnostic 
to make a personal experiment. Honestly 
try Christianity. Permit your souls to be 
touched by its sweet influences, to be waked 
by its call to the finer and deeper and nobler 
issues of life. I have no fear for the result ; 
for I am confident that you will recognize a 
mysterious change in your motives and wills 
with a«sense of forgiven sins as a genuine ex- 
perience ; I am sure that you will become 
conscious of a progress begun toward spirit- 
ual perfection ; that eternity will seem truer 
to you than time, and that you will incline to 
look upon death as a swinging open of the 
gates of happiness. 

A skeptical physician who attended a be- 
loved Christian friend in her last illness, and 
witnessed her holy departure, remarked to an 
acquaintance of mine,. " After all, Christianity 
does cut some ice." Ah ! my friends, to ex- 
tend the inelegant metaphor, Christianity 
cuts all the ice that is cut in the chamber of 



OF CHRISTIANITY. 



355 



death. Philosophy has no consolation to 
offer there ; infidelity averts her eyes ; agnos- 
ticism whispers, " This is the end." But in 
the beatific vision wherein the dying Chris- 
tian beholds those heavenly things which it 
has not entered into the heart of man to con- 
ceive, and extends his hands to loved person- 
alities that have gone before, and addresses 
them by name in affectionate conversation as 
the moment of dissolution draws near, we 
who stand by have surest proof of the pres- 
ence of that sustaining Jesus to whom mar- 
tyrs, summoned to the arena from the sepul- 
cher prisons of Neronean Rome, cried with a 
holy joy, " Lead us on, O Christ ! to death 
and glory." 



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